OmniPage is probably the best known Optical Character Recognition (OCR) suite of all and has changed ownership a couple of times in its long life. Since the purchase of ScanSoft, its 'About' window shows it's a Nuance product, though somewhat schizophrenically it still sets up a ScanSoft group in the Programs menu.

OmniPage 16 Professional is, apparently, between 16 and 27 percent more accurate than before and up to 46 percent faster. Both these improvements would be good for any OCR program.

Previous versions of OmniPage and its main rivals have been able to reproduce the design of complex scanned documents in Word, but often by sticking all the text in boxes, moving the margins to silly places and using columns where none were in the original. Version 16 tries to analyse pages more sensibly and keeps more text directly on the page and more pictures in frames.

With simple letters it does a good job, keeping the main body of the text on the base page, though it still uses text boxes rather too freely and doesn't recognise headers and footers for what they are. With more complex designs it also has trouble recognising fonts outside the normal Arial and Times Roman range.

One new feature that should prove useful is the ability to OCR from photographs of document pages. This includes a separate tool to handle automatic 3D de-skewing and to compensate for distortions caused by positioning of the camera or lens aberration.

The main operation screen of OmniPage 16 Professional is divided into a number of areas. Below the menu bar is a simple toolbar with options to save or print a document. Below that are four tabs which define the start of processing, getting pages, performing OCR and exporting the results.

The main panels display thumbnails of the pages you've scanned, an enlargement of the current page with text and graphics objects highlighted as the program sees them, and the processed document, ready to save. At the bottom of the screen are statistics on the document, though most of the headings are heavily abbreviated, making them difficult to read.

Another new feature is the ability to create PDF files directly from scanned originals, using the PDF Converter 4 utility, bundled in the box. You can even create a spoken audio file from a scanned document. If you're producing documents with sensitive content, you can also block out, or redact, passages of text so they can't be read.

Verdict
OmniPage 16 Professional isn't cheap, but if you can live without the bundled PaperPort and PDF Converter and without functions like batch processing, OmniPage 16 is available at just £79. Despite some odd choices of default and an interface that is less intuitive than Nuance believes, this is still the most comprehensive document conversion suite available.

Company: Nuance

Contact: 0870 241 2126

Tags: optical character recognition omnipage portable document format document arial image scanner document imaging data formats