by Wayne Kawamoto
OmniPage Pro 10
Rating 95
Speaking of OCR when it comes to funneling paper documents into computers, Caere’s OmniPage Pro 10 is among the strongest optical character recognition (OCR) programs on the market. The latest version is much the same as the prior release, but it offers slightly better accuracy when converting scanned pages into editable text. But the killer application is its innovative voice read-back feature, which works as a powerful proofreading tool.
OmniPage’s ability to read back converted text using an electronic voice is an effective way to proofread documents and find errors that may have been passed over.
In our tests, OmniPage Pro did an excellent job of recognizing graphics and headings, maintaining page layouts, and straightening crooked scans. The program averaged a 99.9-percent text recognition accuracy rate on high-quality scans, and an impressive 95.7 percent with poor-quality faxes.
The intuitive AutoOCR toolbar does a great job of guiding users through the capture process. There are also excellent tools for creating, combining, and separating zones, and for drawing irregular zones.
Missing, however, are document management features to organize scanned documents, which were provided in the previous version. The bundled OmniPage Web Personal Edition converts documents into HTML pages, and provides an easy way to post paper documents to the Web or an intranet.
OmniPage Pro 10 is a state-of-the-art OCR package that effectively reads and converts a wide variety of documents. At $500, OmniPage Pro is pricey. The price to upgrade a pervious version of OmniPage is $100. Its improved accuracy and new voice-proofreading feature make the upgrade worthwhile.