Omnipage Pro 12 Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: OPP 12 rocks!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: OPP 12 rocks!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Greatest thing since sliced bread
Review: As I am writing this review OmniPage Pro 12 is whirring away in the background.
I was just minding my own business trying to scan a hard copy report that was made form an 84 page spread sheet. All I got was vertical words. Then it happened; the system said if I wanted the real thing to buy an OmniPage Pro 12 upgrade. All that money for 84 pages? Then I thought of retyping all those pages and it was a no brainier.
I opened the package and started to read the manual. After about five minutes I just decided to take the plunge and put the CD in. five minutes later and the system had installed and checked out the scanner and chose the best approach to scanning to OCR. I used the OmniPage interface once and after playing around realized it was telling me how to use itself with a one-two-three step. Then I realized what the manual was saying and found that I could operate the process even easer from the Microsoft Word program. It works like a charm with no interference to any other process. The scan and OCR calculated that I was copying a table and created one that was appropriate. It even recognized that the page was placed in landscape. I have not tried Excel yet but if it works as well I could kick my self for not doing this earlier.
For those interested this is an XP system.

Rating:
Summary: Very Productive Tool ! It's killing Adobe too expensive ;-)
Review: Don't hesitate Omnipage is excellent ! and you will save a lot of money compared to Adobe's products.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but not as good as FineReader overall
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: PDF life saver
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: PDF life saver
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: not clear it's worth the upgrade from 11
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: not clear it's worth the upgrade from 11
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Does not live up to its claims
Review: 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