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Review
Created: July, 2000
What office has not been stuck with dozens (or hundreds) of
printed documents for which the original computer files were
not available? If you need to use any of this information in
digital form, retyping it all would require long and tedious
work and volunteers would be few and far between.
Computers can take over this thankless task by "reading"
printed material with a scanner and converting the image into
a file usable by any word processor. This process is know as
optical character recognition (OCR).
OmniPage does just that and promises more than 99 percent accuracy
at a speed faster than a seasoned typist. The interface of OmniPage
Pro 8.0 for the Macintosh is fairly straightforward: a tool
bar sits at the top of the screen and allows the user access
to the all the steps of converting a scan into a text file,
from scanning a page to checking spelling.
The first step obviously requires a scanner. This is probably
the biggest problem for OmniPage Mac products: most of the supported
scanners are fairly old and a choice of more modern ones is
sorely lacking.
To add to the problem, the package does not support the TWAIN
standard many scanners can use, so if your scanner is not supported,
you will have to scan every page using a separate program and
save your files as either PICT or TIFF files (the two image
file formats supported by OmniPage) before running them through
this program.
This last operation, luckily, can be automated. The batch processing
feature allows for a large number of files to be processed right
away or at a pre-scheduled time. While a large number of files
may be processed easily, the lack of automation for the scanning
process is problematic.
The converted text is quite accurate when dealing with clean,
typed, printed or type-set pages. Results can be good even with
second and third generation copies, but the more legible a page
is, the better the performance. Artifacts such as toner streaks
will confuse this software.
Some of these problems may be avoided by adjusting the brightness
and contrast of the scan. Handwriting and more artistic fonts
may just be too much for OmniPage, although a "training"
module where the user can "train" a program to recognize
unusual letter shapes are available.
To help things further, a spelling checker is included to correct
errors that may creep in. A nice feature of the proof-reader
is the automatic display of the original scan, making it easy
to verify suspect words. Multiple languages are supported, but
only two dictionaries may be activated at any given time.
Once processed, text can be saved as one long file for all the
scanned pages or as one separate file for each scanned page.
Formats supported include text files, rich text format (RTF),
Word, Excel, Framemaker, WordPerfect and HTML (hypertext markup
language, used to create Web pages), among other formats. The
versions of the aforementioned software it supports are all
at least two to three years old, really showing this package's
age.
While an enticing competitive upgrade price is offered and overall
the software was easy to use and performed well, the age of
this package may be its biggest disadvantage. Macintosh users
are familiar with this phenomenon: updates for Mac products
are frequently behind updates for Windows-based products. Customers
who cannot take advantage of upgrade prices may want to look
at more recent packages, instead.
Note: Caere was acquired by ScanSoft Inc. in March, so although
the software may say Caere on the box, the product is now supported
by ScanSoft. Caere Web site support pages are being redirected
to ScanSoft product support pages.
Reviewer's rating: 2.75 / 5
Comments: ScanSoft (formerly Caere) OmniPage Pro 8.0
for the Macintosh is a good OCR program way overdue for an update
but it's a good buy if the upgrade price is available. If you
have to pay the full price, look for a more recent product.
System requirements: Power Macintosh with 10 MB of free
RAM and 25 MB of hard disk space, Mac OS 7.5 or later, a monitor
with a minimum resolution of 640 x 480 or better and a compatible
scanner.
More info: http://www.scansoft.com/products/omnipage/pro/mac.asp
Price: $441.95 US, $685.95 Canadian
Upgrade: $99.99 US, $121.95 Canadian
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