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Rating: 
Summary: Scansoft ignores the Mac Platform.
Review: I bought this software when it first came out 2 years ago to use with OS X. Since buying it Scansoft has not released one update or bug fix for the program. It will not work with any Photoshop plugins in OS X. I have tried to get it to work with my Canon Lide 30 scanner with no success whatsoever.You would think when you buy an expensive software program you would at least get free email support. No way with Scansoft! Their philosophy is to milk their customers for as much as they can get, charging $20 for each support question by email. If you need to buy an OCR program for your Mac I would highly recommend buying Readiris instead. Although far from a perfect program, it puts OmniPage to shame. Unlike Scansoft they do provide free email support. Readiris is also very good at preserving the format of a document when translated into Word Processing and Text Editing programs. This is something that OmniPage fails miserably at.
Rating: 
Summary: OmniPage 8 for OS 9 was easier and faster.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Inferior to prior versions
Review: 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 alone category."
Rating:
Summary: Thanks for the reviews
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Stay far away from OmniPage Pro X
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A useful tool
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: It's not fully MAC OS X compatable
Review: This version is not 100% Mac OS X compatable. You have to switch to "Classic" mode to scan a document directly into OmniPage Pro X. No where on the box or in the directions does it tell you this. I found out after using my ONE free technical support call. The Mac OS 8/9 version works the way its supposed to. I wasted my money.
Rating:
Summary: It's not fully MAC OS X compatable
Review: This version is not 100% Mac OS X compatable. You have to switch to "Classic" mode to scan a document directly into OmniPage Pro X. No where on the box or in the directions does it tell you this. I found out after using my ONE free technical support call. The Mac OS 8/9 version works the way its supposed to. I wasted my money.
Rating:
Summary: It's not fully MAC OS X compatable
Review: This version is not 100% Mac OS X compatable. You have to switch to "Classic" mode to scan a document directly into OmniPage Pro X. No where on the box or in the directions does it tell you this. I found out after using my ONE free technical support call. The Mac OS 8/9 version works the way its supposed to. I wasted my money.
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