Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: OmniPage Pro X for Macintosh Upgrade
OmniPage Pro X eliminates retyping, saving you time and streamlining document production. Create, convert, edit, and distribute digital documents with superior accuracy and improved formatting. Choose from a host of innovative capabilities, such as table recognition. Pro X also adds PDF functionality to extend the software's value beyond the paper world. Now you can convert PDFs into editable documents with a single click, or save paper documents as PDF files with similar ease. All of which adds up to increased productivity and efficiency. Plus, there's the added ease of working with a program built specifically for Mac OS X.
Note: This is an upgrade version.
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