Omnipage 17 Pro

[pfarber]

I did a 60 page magazine type manual from the 40's last night.

Scanned it in via flatbed scanner.
Ran Omnipage to OCR and make PDF
The only words that it seemed to stumble over were hyphenated words. It also picked up some of the line drawings as words, but the editor/processor prompted me for input.
All in all pretty impressed with the software. A little slow, but not unbearable.

Then I tried to OCR a few select pages (text only, text and graphics, and a full page table) with a digital camera.
The results were much worse. Even with the option to correct keystone and warping, It was 'choking' on significantly more words. I COMPLETELY blame my camera (only 8MP and marginal lighting) as I don't have a stand with lights etc. I hope to see better results with a better input image.

Omnipage is a bit pricey, but it handled mixed pages and tables quite well. Since I most of what I will be scanning are mixed pages, diagrams and drawings I need to preserve the layout and I was quite happy with the results.

I still have the images so I plan to try scantailer and see what happens. But I would say that if you can get a slightly older copy of Ominpage cheap (the older versions don't have PDF support, but the scan engine works fine... I have a copy of Omnipage 3 that came with my used scanner off e-bay, and other than not having PDF output (which can be gotten around) its just as good as the newest version.

[ThatTallGuy]

Good to know, about older versions of Omnipage. I've been fighting with GOCR and Tesseract and I'm ready for something that works out of the box.

[pfarber]

The version that came with the scanner was Omnipage SE... but a quick look on e-bay shows lots versions available.

As with any software that looks to cheap to be true... make sure its not an UPGRADE (requires a previous, licensed version)... some e-bay listsing kind of hid that fact till you read the description/examined the box image.

Get a PDF printer driver (some a free) and you have PDF output.

[ThatTallGuy]

Get a PDF printer driver (some a free) and you have PDF output.

Yep, I use doPDF all the time.

[DDavid]

I used Omnipage starting with very early versions and I did not get good
results until about ver. 10 or 11. I'm using the latest ver. of AABBY and
getting results very similar to what you report with Omnipage 17.

[Tim]

I had similar results with Omnipage 17 (not Pro). Trying to feed it a digital camera image without special attention to lighting and having a flat page gave pretty useless results. They really should be honest about that, but I didn't expect miracles. I would also caution buying the really old versions since the software has come a ways in recent versions. If you don't want to pay the $150 (or wait to get it for $100 or less if you find a bargain) for the non Pro version, then just use something opensource or free that came with your printer. If not, at least try to get a relatively recent version of Omnipage or ABBY Finereader. I agree they have similar results, and even similar workflows. I was just familiar with the Omnipage keystrokes, so I stuck with that.

As a shameless plug for some friends, these guys http://www.blindbargains.com/ will actually search for deals on OCR software and save you some money.

[rob]

I personally never liked Omnipage because (a) I tried it when it was version 11 or 12 or so, and it would always crash, and (b) the workflow for correcting errors wasn't any good at that time.

Since by all accounts Omnipage and ABBYY give similar results, I'll stick with what I know

[mutantstrain]

Does anybody know the difference between the pro and the standard versions of Omnipage 17. As far as I can tell the pro has multicore capabilities. Anything else?

[Tim]

Does anybody know the difference between the pro and the standard versions of Omnipage 17. As far as I can tell the pro has multicore capabilities. Anything else?

The standard has that too. Basically you just have to slog through the list of features for each and see if any of the missing ones from pro to standard matter enough to you. They don't make it really easy since some of the features are in a different order on their lists. The biggest things I see are that Pro acts as a server, where you can place documents in one or more designated folders and they will be OCR'd automatically, Pro includes the Paperport document management software, Pro has some legal document features, and Pro includes various server integration functionality.

http://WWW.NUANCE.COM/imaging/omnipage/ ... sional.asp
http://WWW.NUANCE.COM/imaging/omnipage/ ... andard.asp

[mutantstrain]

Thanks Tim for your help.

With Omnipage 17, as far as the jpeg conversion goes -- how is that? If I already have Scantailor and Adobe Acrobat (the OCR with Acrobat seems decent enough) , is there really any overwhelming reason to get Omnipage? Seems I can get a pretty good deal on it, but I am most interested in a software product that corrects the usual problems with jpegs: Skewing, cropping etc ... and doing it quickly.

The standard has that too. Basically you just have to slog through the list of features for each and see if any of the missing ones from pro to standard matter enough to you.
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