Customer Reviews

Omnipage Pro 12 Upgrade

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned thousands of pages each with OmniPage Pro 12 (OP12) and FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also made extensive use of previous versions of both programs. I am happy to have both, because they excel at different things. For my work, however, if I had to choose just one it would have to be FR6. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.

The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM.

For my purposes, OP12's outstanding feature is the quality of its grayscale and color scans. In fact, I even sometimes use it to produce images for processing by FR6. Generally speaking, the PDF image files produced by OP12 seem to run about 80% smaller than those that FR6 produces for equal text quality -- and better rendition of photos! This is not true for black-and-white (1 bit) files, where FR6 seems to have a slight edge. But when the material calls for image output I usually click on OP12.

OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff. It will suddenly crash no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages.

Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. When I need fast results or cannot tolerate crashes I use FR6, which is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof.

Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up.

In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not immune to this, but does it significantly less often.

FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed.

Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary.

Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product.

As I say, I don't regret the money I've spent on either of them. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper. If the maker of FR6, ABBYY, would fix their scanning (something I've suggested to them several times) it would clearly be the preferable program. As things are, OP12 fills some needs better.

Will O'Neil

Omnipage Pro 12 loves to crash. So much so, that it is impossible to batch convert a folder of files to Adobe Acrobat .pdf "image with text", which is the only really useful Adobe Acrobat format. Here we are in the year 2003, and software developers still haven't figured out how to gracefully exit their programs when the unexpected happens. Ominpage Pro 12 simply cannot deal with Adobe Acrobat .pdf formats well. Review the user groups on Scansoft's website, and you will see two major problems with its Acrobat compatibility. The first is when using Scansoft on an existing .pdf image file. Importing the .pdf file, capturing the text, and saving the file as .pdf "image with text" (which is supposed to save the ORIGINAL image with searchable background text) causes the image to degrade. Don't ask me why, but the image in the output file is not the same quality as the imported .pdf image. So to work around this issue, I started scanning our documents into .tif format (600x600) on our high speed scanner, and then importing the .tifs into Scansoft, for conversion to .pdf "image with text". The resulting .pdf files were graphically sharper than when I had imported existing .pdf files. The big problem is that running the Omnipage Pro 12 "Schedule OCR" on the folder of .tif files, Omnipage Pro 12 simply crashes at random places in the conversion process. No graceful exit. No warning. To summarize, Scansoft's Omnipage Pro 12 is inadequate to save files as .pdf "image with text". It crashes. And this happens on both a Windows 98 PC and a Windows 2000 PC, so it's not a PC-specific issue. Scansoft wants to charge you money to submit a problem form. Imagine, paying them to spend time addressing their own mistake! This is a bad way to conduct business.

I've used Omnipage since version 9, and always it has been the same story--Good software that is a nightmare to install. The best advice is to wait until the first patch comes out.

I've installed and reinstalled this version numerous times, always with the same result--it works once, then freezes up after that.

Don't look for help from Scansoft support. Although there are messages posted describing this problem, there's no fix.

Not good.

As an OmniPage Pro 11 user I was wondering what more ScanSoft could do to make my life easier. I'm glad I upgraded.

First - the OCR is even better (though OP 11 was almost perfect for most of my documents.) The page layout is way better too - a lot easier to edit in Word and Excel.

ScanSoft always seems to do things first in OCR. They added PDF support before anyone else last time around. This time they've added a bunch of cool features, some I am already using, a few that my IT people are keen on.

If you have an MFP or want to do network scanning, the new automatic network batch processing is a must have. You can set it up to grab images from the network, and even put converted documents into other folders. I can use different scanners now from anywhere in the building, and don't really need to upgrade by flatbed scanner (again).

Grabbing graphics off of documents and PDF reports is great now, and it does a better job at tables than OP 11. Tables and spreadsheets really require perfect OCR, which is why I really upgraded. No disappointment here.

Install went smoothly, and works great on my Windows XP system (64MB
RAM, mostly for my graphics program.

I work in a company that uses high-end scanning (we actually use the OCR from ScanSoft in our high-volume system, that can process 500,000 pages a day.) The power in OP 12 is hidden in the simple interface, but if you need it - buckle up.

I like the new batch mechanism, which has an "output file per input file" option. I haven't particularly noticed a stability problem (Win2K SP4 + OP12 SP1/2). However, the deal with the PDFs is this: when OP12 reads an image PDF, it will only save such PDFs as grayscale (if you ask for image/image+text), and OP12 can only save grayscale/color PDFs at 150dpi. Hence, if you have bi-level input PDFs at >150dpi resolution, you get enormous, ugly 150dpi grayscale output PDFs. On the other hand, OP12 can handle high resolution TIFFs just fine (i.e., it will save them as image/image+text PDFs with the correct resolution). This makes absolutely no sense and is a big step backward from OP11. As the other reviewer notes, they appear not to have any intention of fixing this in OP12.

I've been using OmniPage since version 6, and this is by far the best version ever. I wasn't going to upgrade this time, but I saw the PC Magazine editor's choice + 5 star award and figured it would be worth it. It was. The formatting and accuracy are nearly perfect, and the PDF conversion is a great step forward from version 11. The time savings associated with those conversions more than paid for this product.

I was very interested in purchasing this up grade because I have Pagis Pro Millennium and it works just great. You can scan, copy, fax, ORC the works.

If you are a previous owner of Pagis Pro, you will be so disappointed that you will want your money back once you try Version 12. The ORC is worse that Pagis Pro and all you can do is scan. I had to make some documents real quick and got so frustrated with Omnipage Pro 12 Upgrade
by ScanSoft

that I got out my Pagis Pro CD and loaded it back on and used it. I was done in nothing flat.

Had my copies and scans done without being tormented by the ORC package in Pro 12.

I recommend you do not buy this product and let them come up with a real upgrade. If you can find a way to try before you buy, do it. You will see what I am talking about.

Student, Indiana University of Pennsyvania

I have to deal with lots of incoming PDF documents during the day at the law office. I used to edit all of them manually, but now, I convert them into Word and edit in Word...saves me 6-8 hours per week. I'd recommend this to anyone that needs to convert PDF files.

Don't hesitate Omnipage is excellent ! and you will save a lot of money compared to Adobe's products.