Amazon.com Review

Known for its accuracy and ease of use, OmniPage Pro 10 has earned its reputation as one of the most popular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications available. By converting printed documents into editable text, this program frees the user from hours spent retyping letters, papers, contracts, and more.

Pages from books, magazines, and faxes are easily processed using the automated wizard. Process pages directly from your scanner or from one of six popular image file formats. You can even import text directly into a document that you are working on in Word or another application without opening OmniPage Pro. The application lets you choose whether you would like to save plain text, text with formatting, or text and images with formatting.

The most visible improvements to this version fall under the page layout heading. For example, the OmniPage True Page output format provides a nearly perfect replicate of the printed page for easy export to desktop publishing software. There is also a new feature that can read recognized text out loud to aid in proofreading.

The manufacturer claims that OmniPage can recognize text on almost any document, including poor photocopies or faxes with better than 99% accuracy. Our tests showed much poorer accuracy on photocopies, faxes, and color printouts, but the results were good enough to represent a significant timesavings over retyping documents. Other documents were handled remarkably well, including text and images scanned from a full color magazine. --Elizabeth Wall ... Read more

Reviews (4)

OUTSTANDING PRODUCT
This is just a great product - I was great value - so i found it.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCT
This is just a great product - I was great value - so i found it.

Great features but fatally flawed
I was very impressed with the quality OCR and the ease of use. However, I experienced frequent stability problems where the program refused to scan.When I spoke with Caere's technical support, they informed me that the program required 80% free system resources in Win 98.I found that I dropped below 80% when running only virus software, Outlook, Word and a few smaller programs.This rendered Omnipage of no use to me.Without this flaw I would have given it five stars.

easy to use
hello just installed it the other day and have had grreat responses from the people here at work on how much easier it is to use versus our other scanning programs. so this will be the only program that we will use from now on. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 10 Scan Suite Plus offers six software products in one box at a tremendous savings. It contains everything you need to do more with your scanner and your digital camera and create Web sites. OmniPage Pro Scan Suite Plus is an easy, fast, and accurate way to convert paper documents into editable electronic documents that look just like the originals. Retain original layout, fonts, tables--even visuals--with TruePage technology. The voice readback feature reads text out loud, so you can proof your work by listening. Use MGI PhotoSuite III SE to capture photos from scanners, digital cameras, CDs, or the Web, and organize them into albums. Remove red-eye and wrinkles, and repair faded photos. Enhance photos by twisting, distorting, and re-colorizing them and more. Use PhotoSuite templates to easily place any photo in a Web site, newsletter, or brochure. OmniPage Web PE converts multipage paper documents, such as manuals and reports, into working Web sites. After traditional OCR has been performed, Logical Structure Recognition technology outlines the document and creates links for e-mail addresses, cross-references, and URLs. If you can click, you can turn your business into an e-business with NetObjects Fusion 4.0, a HomePC Magazine Product of the Year. It's a productive way to build, manage, and update dynamic Web sites efficiently in the best WYSIWIG environment available. Post-it Software Notes from 3M are the quick and easy way to organize and communicate your ideas. Use them just the way you use paper Post-it Notes.Jot down your thoughts and reminders, and keep track of travel plans, questions, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, to-do lists, meetings, birthdays, and more. Get control of your documents with PageKeeper Pro 3.0, the document manager that automatically organizes all your documents and instantly finds the ones you need. PageKeeper Pro handles the work automatically with Smart Folders, and saves your time for more productive uses. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Program shut-down and other frustrations
I used the Omnipro 10 and found it often shut-down in the middle of performing OCR and wouldn't keep the zones in a templet I had saved to read the same documents and capture specific bits of data.Otherwise the toolbars are well thought-out and the windows easy to move around. The help could be a little more extensive most times I found I had to go to the website for any help beyond the obvious, "Is your scanner turned on?". For document and data capture I recommend looking around first.

Omnipage Pro is Great, Pagekeeper Pro a bust
Out of the box, the OCR software works great with my HP 4C Scanner. Even fax pages are done very well. Nice facility for changing the words that the OCR software does not recognize. Also nice feature to "train" the OCR to recognize more. Pretty fast too, although this would depend on your scanner and PC. I am getting about 15 seconds a page with a Pentium II 550, 128MB memory with Windows NT 4.0. Pagekeeper Pro to manage the scanned paper images does not work correctly and the caere.com support web site is apparently dead now so I could not see if I was doing something wrong, an install error or if there was a fix for the problem. So some of the nice features you see in the sales literature do not work. A bust for me there.

I have used Omnipage 9 & 10
I have used both 9 and 10 (downloaded 30 day free trials via web site)andthought both were great!I do not think the "suite" offers greatextras (I'm looking for a forms scanning software that is decent for under$100, thiers is $150).I think the OCR program alone is a great value forunder $100.

OCR Software
Have not used product before, but told is excellent and this is the lostest price I have seen so far. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 11 is the fastest, easiest way to turn paper documents into digital files you can edit. It features superior accuracy and the ability to convert PDF files into Microsoft Office documents. OmniPage Pro 11 extends its recognition capabilities from 13 to 114 languages and from one to three alphabets, including Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic. This new version also handles grayscale and color images. It can use the extra pixel-depth information in grayscale images to internally generate black-and-white images for optimized OCR performance.

The new page formatter in OmniPage Pro 11 allows you to maintain every aspect of your original document, including columns, tables, and type styles. You can save documents in PDF format for archiving or sharing: image and paper documents can be transformed into PDF files for searching, preservation, and cross-platform distribution. The new IntelliTrain feature takes note of the changes you make in the proofing process. It then goes on its own "search and destroy" mission to find any recurrence of similar errors and corrects them automatically.

New despeckle enhancements allow you to take degraded documents like faxes and copies and recognize them with accuracy. And the ability to maintain text alignment and cell styles of spreadsheets and tables (even no-grid tables) means you won't have to worry about retyping or reformatting. You can also perform OCR functions directly from your favorite Microsoft programs for hassle-free OCR. This works with Office 97, 2000, and XP. WYSIWYG HTML output means you can easily turn documents into Web pages. With this version, the program can now also recognize color backgrounds and color text. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Second best
I am something of an OCR fanatic because I depend a lot on being able to digitize research material for compact storage and easy access. I began some years ago with TextBridge and looked forward to seeing what Scansoft had done in melding the features of TextBridge and OmniPage. The result was a big disappointment. The ability to make PDFs in one step is a major improvement but they "lost" one the features that I find most important -- automatic separation of a scan of two pages at once from a book into separate scan pages. And the recognition accuracy and flexibility doesn't even come close to the standards set by ABBYY FineReader 5.0 (or even the earlier versions of FR!).

The one significant advantage of OP over FR is its ability to accept PDF files directly as inputs. Unless that is of overwhelming importance to you and your needs for recognition of complex material are modest, I would definitely skip OmniPage and get FineReader instead -- and save a bundle of money in the process.

Essential Document Management Tool
This is a must-have program is you scan documents or receive faxes on your PC.It takes optical scanning recognition (OCR) to a level I never thought possible, and is a quantum leap from the OCR software that comes bundled with most scanners.ScanSoft, the manufacturer, claims a 40% improvement and from my experience I will not dispute this.

What I love, though is the fact that it handles columns and tables by doing a near-perfect conversion.It will also save your scanned files as HTML, which is a real plus if you have a web site and want to quickly add pages without creating them from scratch.

Adding to the power is the ability to import Adobe PDF files and convert them into Word documents, as well as to export your scanned documents as PDF files.This feature is convenient, but does not fully replace Adobe Acrobat 5.0, which does a lot more (see the Amazon product page for a fuller description of this software).

Other strengths is the "despeckle" module that will read scanned documents that have smears and other imperfections that will confuse other OCR programs.

I am using this software on a Windows 98 Second Edition system with a Canon CanoScan N650U USB scanner (the scanner is available from Amazon), and have been nothing but pleased with it.If you handle documents, especially faxes or paper, this will be one of your most essential tools. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 11 is the fastest, easiest way to turn paper documents into digital files you can edit. It features superior accuracy and the ability to convert PDF files into Microsoft Office documents. OmniPage Pro 11 extends its recognition capabilities from 13 to 114 languages and from one to three alphabets, including Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic. This new version also handles grayscale and color images. It can use the extra pixel-depth information in grayscale images to internally generate black-and-white images for optimized OCR performance.

The new page formatter in OmniPage Pro 11 allows you to maintain every aspect of your original document, including columns, tables, and font styles. You can save documents in PDF format for archiving or sharing: image and paper documents can be transformed into PDF files for searching, preservation, and cross-platform distribution. The new IntelliTrain feature takes note of the changes you make in the proofing process. It then goes on its own "search and destroy" mission to find any recurrence of similar errors and corrects them automatically.

New despeckle enhancements allow you to take degraded documents like faxes and copies and recognize them with accuracy. And the ability to maintain text alignment and cell styles of spreadsheets and tables (even no-grid tables) means you won't have to worry about retyping or reformatting. You can also perform OCR functions directly from your favorite Microsoft programs for hassle-free OCR. This feature works with Office 97, 2000, and XP. WYSIWYG HTML output means you can easily turn documents into Web pages. With this version, the program can now also recognize color backgrounds and color text.

This version of OmniPage Pro 11 supports five users and comes packaged in one box with five CD-ROMs. ScanSoft includes a single set of supporting media and documentation. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 12 is a powerful productivity application that delivers accurate document conversion, turning PDF and paper letters, contracts, tables, and manuals into editable word processing and spreadsheet documents. Ideal for desktop, workgroup, and enterprise users, OmniPage Pro 12 delivers everything you need to convert, edit, process, and share your paper and PDF documents.

OmniPage Pro 12 saves you time by eliminating the need to manually reproduce documents and spreadsheets, delivering highly precise, editable results that can be used in your existing PC applications. It saves you money by replacing manual filing with electronic storage and retrieval. Best of all, it combines desktop ease-of-use with advanced XML, batch processing, PDF, and Open eBook capabilities, all within a single, affordable application. ... Read more

Reviews (11)

Suspicious 5 star reviews on this product
Crashes too much.

Look at the dates on the other reviews (all of them - about 10 at this time).Notice all the nice "5 star" reviews come in clumps on the same date (3 on one date, 2 on another, 3 on another)!Also note that nearly all the "5 star" reviews are from people who did not have any other review on Amazon.And they are all about the same length.

I trust the lower star ratings reviews on this product more than the 5 star ones.Especially the person who wrote the longish review.

Omnipage Pro Loves to Crash
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 [a fee]to submit a problem form. Imagine, paying them to spend time fixing their own mistake! This is a bad way to conduct business.

Valuable, but not the best
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. OP12 is a good package and can serve some needs adequately, but for my work, FR6 is superior in every respect. 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.

Both do a good job of scanning. FR6 offers the option of more control over the scanning process, but OP12 generally does well with its automatic settings.

OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff, at least on my system. It will suddenly crash with 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. FR6 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 altogether 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, OP12 is a good product and will no doubt serve many people well. If it comes free or at a very low price my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper.

Will O'Neil

PS: I should remark that in the past I have complained of a few shortcomings in FR6 relating to scanning. I have now concluded that these were a result of scanner problems and/or some faulty settings on my part.

Quality + Speed + Accuracy = Very Satisfied Customer
More accurate than any other scanning software on the market.Equipped with a bevy of good features, many of which you'll actually use. Can even scan and manipulate PDFs. This feature alone is worth the price, which is very reasonable given the power and performance. Have purchased ScanSoft products before for their speed and reliability.Omnipage Pro 12 Office is another impressive leap forward.Highly recommended.

Great product, great price
Powerful software with multiple functionalities. Easy to use and exceptionally accurate.Favorite options: ability to edit PDFs and convert scanned files into HTML.Software saves a lot of time and pays for itself over the course of a couple months.Very satisfied.Can't beat the power for the price.Great product! ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 8.0 for Macintosh is the world's most accurate desktop optical character recognition (OCR) software available for Macintosh Computers. The world's best-selling OCR software quickly and easily converts paper documents into computer-editable documents with better than 99% accuracy so you can use them in your favorite applications. With your scanner and OmniPage Pro, you'll never need to retype another document. And OmniPage Pro for Macintosh retains color images from the original page. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro frees users from the necessity of retyping printed documents, such as memos, reports, contracts, correspondence, and résumés, so they can be used in computers. It converts printed documents and computer faxes into editable electronic text for use in word processing and other text-based applications.OmniPage Pro's secret? Optical character recognition (OCR), which allows the computer to translate character images into editable text using special software. OCR is used by office workers, lawyers, insurance folks, graphic designers, governmental staffs, journalists, and anybody who wants to take a printed document and put some or all of it into their computer in editable form without having to do the retyping themselves. ... Read more