OmniPage Pro 17 – A Costly Affair With Added Features
OmniPage Professional 17 from Nuance has variety of features added to its previous version to make it even more impressive and powerful application in optical character recognition. On testing its shipping version, it is found that various documents from as simple as one-column formats to as complex as magazine-style page were easily converted into easy to edit text as well as PDF files.
The OCR process was nearly perfect and flawless, with only few occasional typographical errors which can be easily corrected with built in proofreading and tools for text editing given with OmniPage. In one of the test situation 11,175 characters had 11 errors giving 99.9 percent accuracy. Nuance in its statement has declared OmniPro 17 to be faster and more accurate than its 16 version. As version -16 of OmiPage was very accurate the dramatic change in accuracy rate is not noticeable. In fact there was no change in error rates for certain test documents when converted with both the version.
Although there is no significant difference between version 16 and the latest version 17 of OmniPage, certain noteworthy improvements in the features are observed. Some of the improved features that are useful are – multiple loading of files into OmniPage with the help of Easy Loader (window of the window explorer style) for OCR conversion, enhanced OCR support given to Microsoft Office 2007 with the help of toolbars that appears within Excel, Word and PowerPoint, and much improved working with digital camera images of magnitude 2 megapixels and more (images taken from iPhone and other phone cameras) that compensates for distorted lines and skewed text automatically.
Keeping in mind the popularity of e-books, OmniPage has got a Kindle Assistance in its added feature that makes a macro to be sent automatically to Amazon Kindle book reader, a converted document. To make this feature error free to use it is advisable to add an extra proofreading step before sending to Amazon Kindle so as to assure typo free e-book for reading.
The price $500 of OmniPage Pro 17 is costly as compared to other full-featured OCR packages such as Abbyy FineReader 9 – Professional Edition at $400 and Iris Readiris 12 Corporate at $399 but it has something different ScanSoft PaperPort 11, an document manager and Nuance PDF Create 5, a PDF conversion utility.
If you are using OmniPage Pro 15, then up gradation to version 17 is recommended since version 17 brings improved application interface, advanced features, and easy to use. But if you are using version 16 then a closer look at analyzing whether latest version has all the additional benefits that justify its installation is required. OmniPage Pro 17 is for workgroups and network users, but Nuance has in market a standard version for the cost of $150 which is ideal for individuals and small business users.