Product Reviews

Of all the rash technological predictions of the 1980s, the forecast of the imminent arrival of the paperless office takes the prize for absurdity - 20 years after its projected demise, paper dominates the office as never before.

The popular OCR application OmniPage has long proved a saviour for Mac users looking to digitise hard copy. Now, after nearly four years without an update, new owner ScanSoft has streamlined and improved the application to function under Mac OS X as well as Mac OS 9.

Going native

Although much has changed in the OCR market since OmniPage Pro X's predecessor, OmniPage 8, was released, it's testament to the program's maturity that most of the changes concentrate on usability, rather than additions.

That's not to say functional improvements are absent. The news that OmniPage Pro is OS X native will please the thousands of Mac users stuck with Epson, Canon or Umax scanners, which remain largely driverless under the new operating system. But while these devices can be used with OmniPage, it's in a roundabout fashion - if your scanner lacks native support, a small program is launched in Classic to take advantage of the scanner's existing OS 9-compatible drivers. Still, it's a neat temporary solution to an irritating problem.

Alongside other peripheral improvements, such as the ability to read aloud translated text, OmniPage Pro lets you extract text from static PDF documents. As PDFs are common in office environments, the ability to repurpose them - OmniPage can export to Office v. X, RTF, Framemaker and HTML - will be a Godsend. What's more, the results from the PDF imports we tested needed almost no tweaking.

OmniPage also exports to PDF, which might not appear a strong selling point in OS X, where every application has access to PDF output through the Print command, but there are useful extras, such as the ability to create PDFs over text. This

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means that resulting PDFs are searchable, while remaining accurate representations of the original.

Beyond recognition

But it's in the usability stakes that OmniPage shows most progress. Years ago, OmniPage provided the interface template for similar applications, with separate areas showing scan thumbnails alongside image and text views of the scanned document. Whenever the image view is active, a palette allowing you to control the zoning pops up. OmniPage continues to innovate, with subtle changes making scanning and recognition easier.

For example, the program's toolbar is now cleaner and more comprehensible. The three buttons that control scanning, reading and exporting also contain a drop-down menu where you can set and retain your preferences for each stage. Two other features illustrate OmniPage Pro X's ease of use - an Assistant button, which tackles the entire OCR process according to those preset preferences, and a Direct OCR applet, which sits in the Dock or the Apple menu and lets you import text while working in any application.

Recognition performance was good rather than outstanding. Declarations of increased precision go with the territory at the release of any OCR product (ScanSoft follows tradition by claiming a 40% increase in accuracy - read this alongside its predecessor's claims of 99% character recognition), but this version proved highly accurate on clean text down to tiny sizes.

ScanSoft has bravely attempted to challenge that bugbear of the OCR application - the smudged fax - by introducing a Despeckle tool, but the impact of this new feature couldn't easily be measured, as there's no way to adjust its settings.

Turning the tables

OmniPage's single weakness up to now has been its handling of tables. Although this is another area addressed in the update, it could still do with some work. In our test of several pages of varied columnar data, it lagged slightly behind the accuracy level shown by rival Abby Finereader (see Reviews, 8 February 2002, p33).

We were impressed though, with OmniPage's proofing tools, in particular the ability to import text-based user dictionaries from applications as varied as AppleWorks and QuarkXPress.

Although its functionality is hindered by a lack of third-party drivers, OmniPage Pro's power and inexpensive competitive update pricing make it a sound choice for anyone using OS X. But for OS 9 or first-time users, Finereader Pro is an equally capable and better-value choice.