Product Description

OmniPage Pro X Upgrade For Mac ... Read more

Reviews (8)

It works fine in OS X for me.
Just wanted to clear up some misinformation. I installed Omnipage Pro X in OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I did not need to use "Classic" to install it, nor to do any scanning. My scanner is a Canon LiDE 35, which has an OS X TWAIN driver. So everything is fully OS X compatible.

OmniPage 8 for OS 9 was easier and faster.
I installed OmniPage Pro X 10 upgrade for Macintosh on my new G4 PowerBook running OS 10.3 Panther. The installation went smoothly. I have used OmniPage Pro 8.01 for Macintosh for years, and found that it generally did a good job. I expected OmniPage Pro X 10 to be at least as good, but I found some problems.

ScanSoft claims that OmniPage Pro X works with all TWAIN compliant devices, and allows direct scanning into OmniPage, but it wouldn't do this from my Brother scanner. I have to use one of their "workarounds" by scanning pages into Apple's Image Capture (comes free with Mac OS X, and saves page scans as TIFF files), then load these images into OmniPage.

I find that both loading the TIFF file page scans, and scanning the text is much slower for OmniPage Pro X than for OmniPage Pro 8 - to the point of being annoying. ScanSoft claims that Pro X has much improved OCR accuracy, but my experience has been that if it is more accurate it is only moderately so. It still can't properly interpret font sizes, heading and indent formats.

A few other things were particularly annoying:

- Pro X throws up a dialog box requesting you to set Zoning Instructions for every page scan! When you are scanning dozens of pages this is a real time waster. Pro 8 never had this, and, given that my Zoning Instructions are always the same, it should be able to be turned off with a Preferences setting.

- Pro X does not automatically expand the Text View window to allow you to see all of the scanned text after it has been recognized like Pro 8 did. You must drag the window border, or slide window buttons back and forth, every time you want to look at what you just scanned. And there is this odd glitch that doesn't show the border being moved as you drag it - you must release the mouse button then the border shows where you just dragged it to.

- Command - + does not allow you to increase the scanned text size in the Text View window (so that you can read it) like Pro 8 did.

- ScanSoft free support allows only one call for one issue, then they cut you off and demand $20 for any other issue support thereafter - a bad policy for a company trying to market a complicated and awkward piece of software.

I have stopped using OmniPage Pro X 10. The solution I have settled on is to scan pages with Apple's Image Capture, and do OCR with OmniPage Pro 8.01 running under the OS X Classic environment. I just finished a long document, and this arrangement worked fine. OmniPage 8 has reasonably good character recognition accuracy.

Stay far away from OmniPage Pro X
The only reason I gave this product one star is because that's the lowest Amazon allows -- there is no "zero" stars option, and zero stars is what this product deserves. ScanSoft has ripped off the Mac community by NEVER fixing a snafu in their installer that will not work in MacOS X even though the product is touted as a MacOS X product. You MUST have the Classic envirenment installed. Those of us who have finally moved totally to MacOS X are screwed. As big as ScanSoft is, I thought they would have been more ethical than this. BIG MISTAKE. I've contacted them about this and their response in a nutshell: "Too bad, so sad."
I will NEVER purchase a ScanSoft product ever again.

Here's my payback: I'm an IS manager for a BIG company and we're in an upgrade cycle. Care to guess what Windows OCR software I WON'T be buying?

One other thing. Here's an opportunity for some lawyer to make some quick cash by bringing a class action against ScanSoft for selling a defective product.

A useful tool
This is not a well-supported product, as reviewers below have noted. But it is a useful tool and I do recommend it.

The major limitation is scanner support. You may be fortunate enough to own one of the handful of scanners that OmniPage supports directly, but really your best solution is a great product called Vuescan from Hamrick software, which supports over 300 different scanners (!); and which can save your scans to disk, which OmniPage can then import. Vuescan solved my scanner support problem - and I have an old little-sold scanner that is no longer manufactured; if it worked for me, chances are excellent that it will support your scanner as well.

For the rest of this review, I'll do a close comparison of OmniPage and ReadIris. I use both programs on a daily basis, and they are the top products in this category (I have evaluated a few other products but didn't find them worth using):

Speed: ReadIris is much faster, for me over twice as fast as OmniPage. This is not a real critical category; the OCR speed is only a small part of the time required for the overall process. Proofing and correcting is far more time-consuming (by a factor of 10) and requires real work, not just waiting for an OCR program to run in the background. The REAL speed issue with these programs is their accuracy - the more accurate they are, the less time required for proofing.

Stability: OmniPage wins here. ReadIris bombs on about 30% of its jobs, while OmniPage almost never does. I have never had a job which I eventually couldn't get ReadIris to process, but re-running jobs is nevertheless annoying.

Orientation correction: the accuracy of both programs deteriorates badly if the text isn't perfectly horizontal. While both can correct the orientation of a page, neither can correct the orientation of individual blocks of a page. If you have books, do the right and left pages separately (it is very had to get both pages in a book oriented exactly the same way) and your results will be much better. If you have pages with mixed orientation, I don't have any solution: get ready for real pain.

Zoning: the first step in recognition is to break the page into blocks of text or graphics (called zones). Both programs have automatic zoning, but for anything other than simple layouts, the automatic zoing is very imperfect and you may want to do it manually. Both programs desperately need drag selection to select multiple zones, but neither has it. Otherwise, OmniPage has a reasonable design, but ReadIris is more of a user torture test: tools are in a menu rather than a palette and you have to switch tools to select vs. draw (which you don't in OmniPage), so you have to switch tools often and you'll come to really hate that menu.

Formatting Accuracy: a nightmare for both - just forget it. I don't know why they bother trying; I think you'd have to be blind to accept either one. Use the software to grab the text, and then reformat it yourself. In order to do this, however, it is extremely desirable to preserve the line breaks rather than merge lines into paragraphs (which both programs can do and is extremely useful for text with little or no formatting). ReadIris lets you do this just the way you'd expect, but OmniPage has an irritating "feature" in that if you choose to save the text with line breaks you will find that the line breaks OmniPage saves are not the ones in the original document but different ones that it added itself: Arghh! A workaround I've found for OmniPage is to save it as PDF, then copy and paste the PDF text into an editor.

Text accuracy: this is what the game is really all about, but there is no clear winner here. Some pages are better handled by ReadIris, others by OmniPage. There are lots of small differences I've noticed, such as commas vs. periods: ReadIris tends to mistake periods for commas while OmniPage tends to mistake commas for periods. ReadIris does better with ambiguous letter shapes, while OmniPage does better with tables. I can't give an exhaustive list of the differences because in most cases I don't know why one program did better than the other. Both programs have a "learning" mode that is supposed to improve results, but I have not found either one useful. What OmniPage does have that is very useful is a "proof" mode, where it allows you to efficiently correct its output (and add to its dictionary) after scanning but before saving.

In conclusion, if you do significant OCR work, you will want both programs in your toolbox. The negative reviews of this program note some of its weak points, but it has proven an extremely useful tool for me - I continue to use both it and ReadIris (a useful method is to scan the same pages with both and then use a program like MS Word to compare them: this lets each program identify possible mistakes by the other). In my experience, the either-or approach implicit in those reviews is a mistake. Having OmniPage and ReadIris both has given me vastly better results than either of them would have provided by itself.

Thanks for the reviews
Just a quick thank-you to the others who have written. I was set to buy the upgrade, assuming that 'Pro X' meant OS X compatible. Thanks for saving me $130, and turning me on to Readiris - actual OS X software. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

With Formulator, you can scan forms, complete them onscreen, and print the finished form in no time. Choose from printing your data onto the original, or print a copy of the form with your entries included. Formulator offers nothing short of precision printing within your original form layout. Boxed letters are no problem. Field positioning is freely adjustable and mouse controlled. You set field order and criteria. Best of all, automatic completion of data fields, such as date and time, makes the entire process a breeze. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

This program rock!
I wuv this program, very nice. Much better than Winforms and I am even member of company! Very nice, yes. Very nice.

Horrible Product
Horrible software program, however better than it's top competitor Zipform. Try getting THAT program to work. Good luck!! Error-mania.

Lousy Customer Service
This software was unable to operate with my system configuration and Global Village Inc., has refused to refund my monies even though the software was sent back to them. Don't buy this product. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

FineReader Sprint 4.0 turns your scanned documents into editable electronic files in seconds. This versatile optical character recognition (OCR) scanning software features full-color OCR and full layout retention. FineReader seamlessly saves your documents to popular office programs such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and other Office 2000 applications, as well as in WordPerfect and WordPro formats. It retains page layout, including columns, tables, graphics, and fonts. And, if you've got a document that's less than ideal to begin with, no worries--you'll still get great results, and you'll never have to retype a document again.

FineReader Sprint 4.0 delivers over 99 percent accuracy. One-button scanning and recognition makes using the software a breeze. This program recognizes typographic text in 53 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Ukrainian and every language in between. Save recognition results in text and Rich Text file formats. FineReader handily batch-processes images with great speed and identifies unrecognizable characters by bolding text. You can manually mark blocks as well as set scanner brightness and resolution. With full support for the Twain protocol, this program is compatible with just about every Twain-compliant scanner available. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Careful with demo
The demo will not save your files but will not tell you why. It looks like the file is saved but it is not. The resulting Word documents, PDFs and HTML pages will be empty. It turns out that it is a limitation of the demo version, but the program does not bother to tell you. I think this is rude and misleading.

After a Quick Look
I received the standard version, but did not know the CD has two versions; the "Pro" version is included as a try/ buy demo, while the standard version is primitive. Text recognition is good, but preservation of the origninal layout is poor.I was dismayed when the scan result completely dropped a column of numbers on my first trial scan, and would not pick it up unless I manually blocked the column, but then everything else was dropped.I tried a scan combining text and graphics, and the result was very garbled.The resulting file transfered well into WordPerfect, but not into MS Word, as claimed.The "Pro" version did somewhat better, but not to my satisfaction.I need something else. This product is supposed to recognize characters of 53 languages (especially Russian), so for some people that may be the deciding feature.

The great OCR software
I think it is a best software on OCR market. It's easy-to-use, fast, multilingual. It has a lot of possibilities, works with cells, rotated texts, graphics and so. The try-and-buy version are aviable. Enjoy! ... Read more

Features

• Synchronizes with your PDA or conatct database - Pocket PC, Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, GoldMine & more
• New OCR technology for rapid and accurate information taken straight from your business cards
• Intelligent business card processing with automatic orientation, deskewing & cropping
• Powerful contact database for archiving, searching, selecting and exporting your contacts
• Define which fields you want to print as a list, or as labels -- all popular label formats are supported

Reviews (1)

cardiris3
This operates pretty simply, but for the price I would have expected more features.The OCR is fair with only 10-15% of the cards populating the fields all correctly.
Major drawbacks are that cards with black color in them split into two cards.
No crop or straighten tool (the program claims to auto-straighten but does not work well)I fixed this by using an Avery (7600) clear 3 ring binder card holder page to keep the cards straight while scanning.This has helped a lot. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro X eliminates retyping, saving you time and streamlining document production. Create, convert, edit, and distribute digital documents with superior accuracy and improved formatting. Choose from a host of innovative capabilities, such as table recognition. Pro X also adds PDF functionality to extend the software's value beyond the paper world. Now you can convert PDFs into editable documents with a single click, or save paper documents as PDF files with similar ease. All of which adds up to increased productivity and efficiency. Plus, there's the added ease of working with a program built specifically for Mac OS X. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Don't waste your money
Doesn't seem to work under 10.3.
No patches from omnipage either.

Doesn't satisfy this long-time user
I've used Omnipage for years, going through almost all the versions since the first. When an upgrade appeared it consistently offered incremental improvements and I rarely had to even glance at the user's manual.

Not so with this version. In some key respects it is not apparent how it works even after consulting the manual. There are many more errors in text and formatting. Saves don't even go smoothly. I would guess that something that formerly took me 45 minutes now takes me several hours, including corrections. And I still don't know why the text selection doesn't flow from one page to the next in a multi-page document, as it used to. This product should have been put in the "leave well enough along category." ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

Readiris Pro 8 is easy-to-use text recognition software that converts paper documents (captured with scanners, all-in-one devices, or digital cameras), PDF, and image files into editable text that you can send to your favorite applications. Create a new document and modify the content easily using the new "Flowing Text" mode. While text flows from one column or page to another, pictures, tables, and graphics remain in place for perfect layout retention.

Turn your papers into HTML documents and create Web pages quickly and easily. Conversion to PDF also extends your archiving and sharing capabilities as well as your ability to easily retrieve and reuse information. In addition, Readiris Pro 8 is now up to 35 percent more accurate than Readiris Pro 7 and 20 percent faster. The new user-friendly interface includes a redesigned thumbnail bar and guides you intuitively through the different recognition steps.

Easily select the information you want to recognize on each page. Information outside the selected zone will be discarded. The new "Send To" mode automatically sends the output result to the selected application such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarOffice, OpenOffice, and more. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Does not work well - Go with Scansoft instead
The I used to have Scansoft Textbridge and Omnipage and got ReadIris Pro to change. I mad a mistake the OCR from Scansoft is way better, it performs very well and Textbridge is much easier to use than Readiris.

Don't do my mistake, stick to Scansoft, they also have a better customer and technical support than IRIS

Worst OCR software I've ever seen
Apart from the program crashing every other time it is used, the features are archaic and besides, it requires you register within 30 days of installation or else ... it blows up - just like win XP.

I will recommend OmniPage any day over "readiris".I'm extremely disappointed over the purchase and unfortunately, no money back on this junk.

Great software solution for scanning!
I am very happy with Readiris Pro 8. It was very fast and accurate.I was impressed at the quality of software I received for the price.The program was really easy to use and I have already gotten my money's worth out of this program in just a week.

The best scanner software on the market!
I've tried them all, and IRIS's new 8.0 version truly stands in a category by itself.Simply to use, fast and accurate, the product easily scanned my documents and converted into editable text.The software turned my document into a PDF file without using Acrobat.Amazing! Most impressed with the perfect layout retention ... Read more

Amazon.com Review

With the Readiris Pro series, I.R.I.S. has taken a quick, accurate OCR program and given it the ability to detect page layout and reproduce images. Readiris Pro 7.0 does a decent job at what it's supposed to do, but it's not without a fair number of flaws and flukes.

The problems for us started with installation. Readiris Pro didn't recognize our Microtek flatbed scanner when we went through the otherwise handy setup wizard. It did, however, when we asked it to check out our TWAIN drivers through the File menu. When we were further plagued, this time by error dialogs, we were told by I.R.I.S. tech support that XP users need a patch, which is available through the cluttered I.R.I.S. Web site.

Readiris Pro, like any OCR program, scans a document and then imports it into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word. The program scans text-only documents with alarming accuracy, and its error count is reduced by an interactive learning feature that verifies letters it doesn't understand. It faithfully recreates double-column text, and even text scattered in little blocks, newspaper style.

Readiris Pro is supposed to be able to grab pages with images and recreate them with similar ease, but it had trouble with some of the pages we scanned. Sometimes it saw parts of logos--which should come through as graphics--as letters. Stylized lettering gave the program recognition trouble. In one case, it saw a table as a graphic, making it impossible to edit in Word.

Through its problems, Readiris Pro is a workable OCR program, but it's worth your time to check out reviews of its competition. --Joel Durham, Jr. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Good Value for Home User
Readiris Pro 7 installed smoothly into Windows XP Home Edition on a Clean Boot, as recommended in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 310353.It interfaces with many, possibly most, common word-processing software.The scanning and interpretation process is quick at the recommended 300 dpi level (my Epson scanner is on a USB 2.0 port.)Initial, out-of-box, accuracy seems to improve by tweaking the contrast and brightness options and hopefully will continue to improve by using the "learn" option of interpreting data which it questions.At Amazon's current price it's a good value for a home user! ... Read more

Product Description

Rediris Pro 10 OCR Software Convert you paper documents and PDF files into editable text Readiris Pro 10 OCR software performs all the tedious retyping work for you in no time. Simply recognize your documents with Readiris Pro and within seconds you have an editable copy of it.Readiris Pro 10 recognizes scanned paper documents, PDF files and all popular image file format and turns them into word processor, spreadsheet, pdf, web pages, xml... files.Imagine how easily you could share and archive all your documents and spend your retyping time for more productive tasks!Readiris Pro 10 is a major release and features more than 40 improvements over previous versions. The power of the new OCR software boosts text recognition accuracy to an unprecedented level! - 30% increase in OCR accuracy! - Up to 200 times faster than manually retyped documents! - Intuitive and logically designed User Interface. Anybody can use Readiris Pro 10 instantly! - New barcodes recognition - More versatile PDF creation - More output choices and application compatibility - New capital hand printed text, numbers and symbols recognition - Reads and creates Jpg 2000 - And much more! In other words, with Readiris Pro 10, all your paper documents will be recognized and converted to editable text faster, easier and more accurately than ever before! ... Read more

Amazon.com Review

OmniPage Pro 8 is an OCR (optical character recognition) program, andits sole function is to import pictures of pages of text and convert thesepictures of words into editable text. It works with virtually every scanneravailable, and it is so good at what it does it should be bundled with all ofthem.

Only a few years ago, OCR packages were terribly slow and horribly inaccurate.OmniPage Pro will shatter any preconceptions you may have had regarding an OCRpackage--it has extremely accurate recognition, and on a contemporary G3 Mac itflies.

Version 8 has some exciting improvements as well. The TruePage feature maintainsthe page layout and graphics of the original scanned document, columns and all,and translated documents can be exported to HTML format for use on the Web. Abuilt-in proofreader not only checks the scanned image for errors, it displaysthe original scanned document for manual (visual) checking by comparison.

We could see that there might be diminishing need for a product like this, asmany content producers are Web savvy from the start. But those who need it oftenhave a lot of scanning to do. OmniPage Pro 8 can not only help tame thatmountain of paperwork, but it'll also help you get it on the Webquickly. --Mike Caputo ... Read more

Features

• Update your address book instantly, using Outlook, Palm Lotus Notes, ACT! and other popular tools
• Recognizes characters from up to 50 countries
• Scan & display your own business cards in color
• Synchronizes with your PDA and contact management tools

Reviews (1)

more work needed
My fisrt impression was wow, what a great product, until I used it....
I have the Windows version and found the following problems:
1.) Does not export to ACT, even though the product claims it will.
2.) Does not allow you to import from one database you created into another.
3.) Does not support contacts/addressbooks stored on a shared/network drive. If you have an Exchange or Domino server you will need to create a local file to store your contacts.
4.) Could not get synchronization to work with two pocket PCs, and one Palm OS device.
5.) character recognition accuracy is really poor for cards that have a dark background or pictures.

The only plus is the hardware's small footprint. It is also a twain based color scanner which you can use to scan in old pictures.
... Read more

Amazon.com Review

For optical character recognition (OCR) software to be more effective than hiring a fast typist, it has to be very accurate. It also helps if it can recognize a range of languages. FineReader Pro 5.0 comes with support for more than a hundred languages, although it spell checks only around 25 of the more common ones. It also recognizes programming languages like Java and Pascal.

The quality of recognition of the English texts tested was high--selected texts, from magazines, newspapers, and printouts, required little editing. FineReader Pro 5.0 saves images from the source documents as well as text, recognizes formatting such as column breaks, and will recognize tables. You can send scanned material to the clipboard for pasting into any editor you choose, or send it directly to Microsoft Word, Lotus Word Pro, Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarWriter, or Microsoft Excel. It can also be sent straight to e-mail, or saved as HTML.

The more advanced points of FineReader Pro 5.0, such as fine-tuning scanning quality for optimum results and managing tables accurately, require a little practice to master, and the interface is a bit on the cluttered side. However, for standard OCR tasks, FineReader Pro 5.0 is a useful and efficient application. --Sandra Vogel ... Read more

Reviews (19)

2 Thumbs Up!Incredible OCR accuracy. [bye bye scansoft]
I got my first FULL version with the purchase of PC PRO magazine [issue 118, august 2004].[produced by a UK publisher, www.pcpro.uk.co I think]
It simply required a "Free" registration and then the folks at ABBYY sent a serial number to make it a FULLY functional program.

I have used several programs, the most recent being textbridge 9 and omnipage 8.0 and 9.0.

But the speed and accuracy of finereader pro 5 just blew me away.

The price of the PC PRO magazine had been like $14.99 at my local bookstore [for both the mag and accompanying CD]. By the time it arrived from the publishers in the UK and was put on display at my local bookstore, it was either Sept or Oct 2004.But the ABBYY software installed and registered flawlessly. [despite the magazine disclaimer to register by aug or sept of 2004]

A couple friends saw the program in action and were equally as awestruck as I was. We ran our own evaluation tests between finereader 5 pro and textbridge, omnipage 8 and 9.

Finereader won in both speed and accuracy. Especially accuracy.

I don't have to tell anyone that uses OCR just how much it BITES if your OCR package reports a high percentage of "unreadables" and/or "mis-reads".
[If there are too many unreadables, you can reach a point in which it becomes easier to just type a document out yourself].

Ok, so my documents did have TONS of acronyms.
But I came close to a blister on my finger, when I kept having to hit the IGNORE button,during my scansoft ocr exercises.

Finereader was about 50% less "unreadables or mis-reads".
[sorry I don't have an EXACT percentage to provide].

I really am thinking aboutanupgrade to finereader 7 [the latest version I think] but with version 5 working so well, I hate to change anything.

2 thumbs up ! Way up! Good job ABBYY.

Absolutely Fabulous
ABBYY FIneReader 5.0 Home Edition is an exceptionally valuable, high quality product a very affordable price.This program is as accurate as any other I have tried, costing far more.It is as easy to use as any other OCR software package out there, and is just as accurate.When considering the price is below ...[undisclosed dollar amount], you cannot go wrong with this product.I quit using TextBridge and Omni Page after trying this product.Those other programs cost three to five times more, and provide no greater productivity.Best ...[undisclosed dollar amount]I have never spent on software.

A solid product
This program is not perfect, but does a real good job most of the time.The interface is straight-forward and it is pretty fast.I would purchase this product again.

Awesome product...stinky customer support
I bought this software, primarily on the basis of the reviews on Amazon.It installed easily...and I should note that although I've used several scanning packages, this is the first one I've bought.The capabilities of the software are truely awesome...some real virtuousity is clearly evident.Tables and text scan easily and flawlessly into every kind of file I can think of.Amazing.

The problem I have with Finereader 5.0 Pro it is really two-fold.First, the manual is pathetic...nowhere would one discover how to use the product, much less what it is capable of delivering, if s/he relied on the manual.It just doesn't make sense and has loads of omissions.Second, the email support is literally useless...I don't really think there is anything but an email address at the other end...No response, at all.I was about 15 minutes from returning the whole box when I tried something completely illogical to change the scanner settings, when, Voila!The thing started working.

Whatever, you do...don't rely on the manual.A good technical writer with several weeks' experience with this package could earn this company a lot of grateful and loyal customers.Are you ABBYY guys listening?

beware of patches on website for NEW software
I wish I had checked out the Abbyy website before I bought this. I might have been tipped off to potential problems if I had noticed not one but two separate patches to make this version work on my relatively new computer. But I didn't, and all I saw were the glowing reviews on Amazon. I have a standard, new-ish computer, and above-avg skills. I cannot get this program to work at all. The patches have been installed multiple times, and the program itself has been installed & reinstalled multiple times.

Here's the worst part, however: emails to the company get nowhere. I've emailed several different addresses w/in the company, as indicated on the website, and have gotten no where. Their junk emails to me get well enough, though. I've tried to call, but never seem to hit any time when a person is there. Go figure.

The upshot: don't get ripped off by this company. Once they have your money, they do not give a rat's behind whether the product works. Who knows? Maybe it really did work for all of the other people who reviewed it on this site. But I'm a little skeptical...I don't remember if anyone mentioned patches in their reviews. And I don't believe it is possible to install this program, on any machine no matter how old, w/o downloading a patch from the ABBYY website.

My ultimate review: RUN LIKE THE WIND FROM THIS PRODUCT. ... Read more

Reviews (6)

TextBridge that goes nowhere
This product is completely worthless. I am pretty good w/ computer hard/software but I wasted far too much time trying to get this program to work decently. The writers of this program must have dropped acid while they were writing the code for TextBridge...and I trusted the Xerox name. Shame on me!

What I get for not listening . . .
I read all the other reviews on Amazon, and I bought this software anyway. What a mistake. I had installation problems as well (running Windows 2000 Professional and Office 2000 Premium). I kept getting some sort of registry error, and each time I got the error I was told to reboot my machine (which is only 2 months old). However, when I was finally able to get the software to work (which wasn't long because it kept crashing), I discovered that the accuracy stinks. There is NO way this software is "over 99% accurate" as it advertised. I have a limited edition version of OmniPage 7.0 that came with another scanner that is more accurate than this software. And, don't think that what I was scanning was complicated. It was black and white, plain vanilla text on clean paper. Don't make the same mistake I did in buying this software. You'll regret it. ...

Amazing Software that works!
This software does what it is suppose to do.It takes scanned text and converts it to editable text.I have never seen a piece of software so inexpensive that actually works!

Better yet, it can auto-detect zones.The software knows where the graphics are and where the text are.I love it because I do not want to do that myself.

I would rate that the Optical Character Recognition is the closest to 100% perfect!The best results come from grayscale 300 dpi settings.

I would recommend this to anyone.

Don't buy this software
This software is majorly messed up.When it works it does what it says, but it's a major pain to get it to work.It's constantly giving me errors and refusing to scan.This was the worst software purchase I've ever made.It doesn't even deserve the one star minimum.

TextBridge Pro Millennium
TextBridge Pro Millennium was a big disapointment.First of all it was the installation phase, it seems that when it reaches the part where it goes to add TextBridge menu to Word 2000, it fails and produces an error,then exits setup.Second, There's a major glitch in the software and Idon't think the company is able to resolve it. I have been communicatingwith them for months with no solution.Third, everytime you contact/emailcustomer support, you get a different person handling your problem (it isnot like your file/problem is assigned to one person).Fourth, theironline help or support material relates to an older version. My advise:==> look somewhere else ! ... Read more

Features

• Easy exporting into MS Word, WordPerfect, Excel and MS Office 2000
• This double-shot of scanning software features FineReader 4.0 and Formulator 2.5
• With FineReader 4.0 you can scan and save your important documents with a minimum of fuss and no errors
• One-button scanning and recognition that saves results in. TXT or as a. RTF file
• Unrecognized characters are highlighted in bold for manual alterations

Reviews (5)

It might have been the best ever !
But there was no product serial # in the box, on the CD, in the manual or on the CD jacket. Box had not been tampered with. I could not install it because the serial # is required for the installation let alone evaluate it.

Gives you a low-cost, high-performance OCR package
Abbyy's Home Edition follows the trend of software publishers to milk previous versions of their software, in this case, Abbyy's Finereader 5.0 (the current version for those with lots of money being 6). The OCR engine is solid, and the "1-button" interface is uncomplicated.

When it's time to move beyond the 1-button world, the product has a number of beyond-the-basic features, including the ability to manually identify regions of text, tables, and graphics. For much of today's complex and graphic-intensive layouts, you'll find yourself using this mode, if only to avoid annoying glitches such as parts of dense tables showing up as graphics
in the recognized file, or side-by-side columns becoming tables.

Home Edition handles both scanned files (...) and a wide range of graphic files that contain text. Fortunately, although the manual states that Home Edition recognizes only the first page of multi-page graphics files, that's not true -- all the pages of multi-page FAX TIFF files are recognized.

Recognition is good. For scans at normal resolution, 300 dpi, the total number of errors per page for a mix of type from 9 down to 7 points -- pretty small for OCR -- were the same as my old, 1999 Scansoft Textbridge Pro 8.0. However, the Home Edition errors were far easier to fix ("S" for "$" on small, 7-point type for AHE, less annoying to me than the strange concatentions or "wordifications" for TP8 (such as "Pap er" or "andPublish"). When the same material is scanned into Home Edition at 600 dpi (to add detail to the very small type), errors dropped to half that of Textbridge, which doesn't accept scans of this resolution.

A very difficult case, a second-generation FAX of a magazine article originally in tabloid and reduced to 8 1/2 x 11, was recognized surprisingly well with Home Edition, despite the fact that the type was fuzzy and 4-6 points in size -- and the bioprocessing subject matter had out-of-the-ordinary words. However, the 1-button process made tables of some of the columns, so manual marking of the original was needed.

I miss the ability to view the original scan during proof-reading in Textbrige (and the Abbyy higher-end products) -- as you move the cursor through the recognized document, these show you the same area of the scanned file. In Home Edition, you have to move between the scan and the recognized windows and find your own place. There's also no built-in spell-checker, an odd omission considering the low cost of licensing spellchecking code these days. Perhaps Abbyy is justifying the gap in pricing between Home Edition (less than[$$]) and the Professional line ([$$-$$] at the Abbyy site store). Versus the Pro Edition, Home Edition has 12 languages (121 for Pro); no pattern training for symbols; and no background or batch mode. There's apparently fewer options with HE's manual layout analysis than for the Pro Edition, but the HE options are just fine for most purposes.

Abbyy HE saves recognized text as ASCII TXT, Word, Excel, Word Pro and Word Perfect files, plus HTML and Adobe PDF. The good OCR engine, the ability to handle multiple types of graphics files, and to preserve graphics color, plus its straight-forward interface all make this a good product.

Abbyy Finereader 5.0 Home Edition
This is an example of getting what you pay for. Maybe the Professional editions would work better I do not recommend buying the Home edition. The limited edition of Omipage that came with my scanner does a better job.

Unbelievable accuracy!
I don't think there is a reader out there that can hold a candle to this program. The easiest to work with for ANYONE. You can scan all the pages and then proccess them or scan, read and spell check each as you go along.Then you simply tell it to put it in Word or your clipboard and it will put one or all the pages into one easy to use, or print format.Minimal mistakes, usually caused by poor scanning settings or dirty copy.I tried the try and buy program first and couldn't imagin being without it!

Great Software
I bought a Lexmark X73 and I was just scanning some documents,then it said that the Abbyy Finereader 5.0 software came with it so I used it.The software let me correct things on my documents and other reports that were messed up.If you are looking for a software to correct reports or other documents I highly recommend Abbyy Finereader 5.0. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

Abbyy Fine Reader 5.0 Office is optical character recognition (OCR) software designed for work in the office. The Office version is specially designed for a network. Once installed on the server, it can be installed on workstations directly over the network. Images can be processed on several workstations simultaneously, allowing users to scan on one workstation and recognize them on another. With multiprocessing support, recognition speed is increased in direct proportion to the number of processors installed.

A built-in editor lets users edit the image layout manually. Edit recognized text while looking at an image of the source text in the Zoom window. The built-in spell checker will search text for misspelled words in mere seconds. Included with the Office version is the Formulator, which lets users fill in any form electronically. Just scan in a blank form and have it completely filled in onscreen and printed out in seconds. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

FineReader tops OmniPage-10
I've been using Omni-10 and recently was about to remove the old Presto from my harddrive. However, I ran across the new ABBYY FineReader Office and gave it a try. For my money, it's a LOT better than Omni-10 (don't know about -11 except that it's costly).

FineReader doesn't have the text-to-voice of Omni, but I don't do any recognition of tables (where the feature is supposed to be valuable) anyway. FR's character recognition is superior, but the best feature is that it chooses a font size and kerning that really do an excellent job of reproducing the original (not choosing too-small font sizes with giant spaces, like Omni-10).

Overall, beats Omni-10 -- which in turn beats everything else! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Not Multilingual dictionary! Only set bilingual dictionaries
The is not Multilingual dictionary. The is set of bilingual obsolete dictionaries of 70 - 80 years: English-Russian, German-Russian, French-Russian. And the subjects of the dictionaries surprises, for example there is a English-Russian dictionary on business, and French-Russian dictionary on business is not present. Bad fonts-support. ... Read more

Product Description

Adobe Capture v.3.0 - Complete Product - File Conversion - 1 User(s) Complete Product - Standard, 20000 Page(s) - English - PCConvert large volumes of paper documents to searchable Adobe PDFAdobe® Acrobat® Capture® 3.0 software is a professional production tool that teams with your scanner to convert volumes of paper documents into searchable Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Accurate OCR, advanced page and content recognition, and powerful cleanup tools let you turn all your important paper-based information into high-quality electronic documents ready for publication via the Web, intranets, extranets, CD-ROM, and more. Sophisticated productivity features streamline processing from start to finish, so you can get your jobs done more efficiently than ever. Nice electronics is your source for everyday low prices on theAdobe 22101258 - ADOBE ACROBAT CAPTURE 3.0 20K/PP NT4/W2K DONGLE ONLY and all other Adobe Software - Misc ... Read more

Product Description

Bridge the gap between your paper and digital workflows. Adobe® Acrobat® Capture® 3.0 is a professional production tool that teams with your scanner to convert volumes of paper documents into searchable Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Accurate OCR, advanced page and content recognition, and powerful cleanup tools let you turn all your important paper-based information into high-quality electronic documents ready for publication via the Web, intranets, extranets, CD-ROM, and more. Sophisticated productivity features streamline processing from start to finish, so you can get your jobs done more efficiently than ever.

• Convert scanned pages to searchable Adobe PDF files that anyone with the free Acrobat Reader™ can view, navigate, and print.
• Create reusable document-processing workflows tailored to different types of conversion projects.
• Accurately perform OCR, font, and page recognition.
• Automatically create intra-document links, including tables of contents, cross references, and indexes.
• Efficiently correct OCR text suspects with the new QuickFix tool.
• Use the new Zone tool to define areas of scanned pages to be treated as images, text, or even keywords.