Product Reviews

If you have a scanner there's a pretty good chance that you'll also have a piece of optical character recognition (OCR) software too. And isn't it great? Simply slip a page of text into the scanner, and within minutes you'll be editing the self-same words in your word processor. No need to type everything in laboriously.

The trouble is, some of these free-with-scanner packages can be a bit on the crude side. They're fine if all you want to scan in is a letter from your bank manager in nice, clear 12 point type, but a lot less effective at accurately reproducing a multi-column, multi-page article from a magazine. This is where you need to upgrade to a package like OmniPage Pro 11.

'Upgrade' is the operative word here. The full price for OmniPage Pro 11 is a whopping £435, but the upgrade version costs just £100. And hopefully that's all you'll have to pay as, apparently, you're eligible for the upgrade version if your scanner came with any kind of OCR software at all!

So what do you get with OmniPage Pro to make it worth the extra expense? It can

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be summed up in three words: accuracy, control, and flexibility.

ScanSoft claims version 11 has even greater accuracy than before, coping better with badly degraded documents like faxes. The control you get includes the ability to manually 'zone' complex pages into graphics, tables, boxouts and other design elements, and to handle each individually. The flexibility of this package means you can reproduce printed documents as identical (or as near-identical as practical) Web pages, or even - in this version - PDF files.

The OCR process breaks down broadly into three steps. First, you need to scan the document you want to perform OCR on, and OmniPage can communicate directly with your scanner to do this, automatically applying the most appropriate scan settings. The next stage is for the software to 'recognise' your text. As it processes the image file it may periodically stop to ask you to confirm a spelling or a word, which is then used by OmniPage's IntelliTrain feature to make the software learn as it goes along.

Finally, you can save your document as a web page or a word processor file (say, a Word document) - or in one of many other different formats.

OmniPage Pro 11 is a fairly specialised tool aimed primarily at business users. But it's also useful to those who need to track and store large amounts of paperwork - maybe in connection with clubs, societies or voluntary organisations. It may look expensive, especially given the fact that most scanners come with free, basic OCR software, but OmniPage is very powerful and very flexible, while remaining easy to learn and to use. It does a specialised job very well indeed.