|
[ Go to April 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by James E. Powell
If you own a Visioneer or Hewlett-Packard 4S or 4Si scanner and need more accurate OCR power than those "light" OCR engines, you may want to consider Caere's OmniPage Pro for Visioneer PaperPort 7.0. Used with a standalone or keyboard-integrated scanner, you get the full power of OmniPage Pro for a $79 upgrade. Designed to work on the Visioneer Desktop, you scan in your document, view its image on the work surface, then drag and drop the document's image to an application icon, such as Word or OmniPage Pro, to begin the OCR process. During installation, OmniPage Pro is added to the pull-down list in Visioneer's Link Preferences dialog box. OmniPage offers excellent text recognition and displays questionable words like a spell checker. You can also add custom words to the dictionary. I found the results accurate; the few trouble spots resulted from fancy fonts rather than OmniPage's built-in intelligence. The program lets you manually or automatically select zones (areas to be scanned), and graphics are automatically saved to separate files. OmniPage Pro supports True Page, which reproduces a scanned document in its original layout using frames in programs such as Word and WordPerfect. This ensures the highest adherence to the original document. Unfortunately, the documentation is for OmniPage Pro with an eight-page addendum-confusing for new users. Visioneer's scanner is one of the handiest desktop tools I use. OmniPage Pro enhances it.
|