OmniPage Professional 17 review

Most people only ever encounter OCR software in the form of some stripped-down "Lite" package that's shipped with a scanner or all-in-one printer. But, as OmniPage Professional 17, and rivals such as Readiris demonstrate, there's an awful lot more to OCR software than simply acquiring text and dumping it out to Microsoft Word.

Indeed, for companies who need to turn huge volumes of printed matter into searchable documents, accessible over a network, a well-tailored OCR package is essential, and that's exactly what OmniPage Professional 17 is.

As with Readiris, OmniPage can be used to recognise text (in over 120 languages) and output that to all sorts of different document types. As well as the ubiquitous Word, there's also the option to export to searchable PDF and the long-term archiving PDF/A format, as well as myriad other document types and destinations. You can save to the eBook OPF file type, WAV audio (yes, it does text-to-speech) and even document management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint and others. It's a truly impressive list.

But as important as its range of output is, its accuracy and batch-processing are the star features. Testing with the same originals as Readiris Corporate 12, we found OmniPage to be far more successful.

Reversed text blocks against black backgrounds were recognised and scanned more reliably, and most areas where Readiris fell down OmniPage did extremely well, picking up text next to graphics successfully, hardly requiring any training or tweaking. From plain text to table-based content liberally sprinkled with images, it hardly put a foot wrong.

The batch-processing feature is an extremely powerful tool. This can be fine-tuned as much as you like, with as much or as little user interaction as you want.

It can, for example, be set to watch a folder and then recognise text automatically as images are dropped in, blacking out (or redacting) certain key words as it goes, then email the results to a set address. With OmniPage's workflows allowing you to completely customise the way this works, the possibilities are almost endless.

We found the interface to be a little hit and miss. It's not particularly well laid out, nor is it easy to use straight off the bat, but with a proper workflow set up or completely automated, most users need never get involved with the ugly, frame-based front end.

The interface is OmniPage's major weakness, then, and it isn't cheap software either, retailing at a hefty £252 exc VAT (the upgrade free is even more painful). But it's only a little more expensive than Readiris Corporate 12, and of the two we know which we'd buy. OmniPage Professional 17 does its job admirably well, works extremely accurately and is more efficient and easy to use than its main competitor. If you're in the market for batch-processing, super-accurate OCR software, this is your best bet.

Author: Jonathan Bray