OmniPage Professional 18: A Product Review

The toolkits of carpenters, mechanics, and phone technicians are all essential. The same is true for educators and those in charge of schools, especially when it comes to the use of technology. One of the "must-have" tools is an OCR application (optical character recognition). OCR allows you to convert a document that is now only available in print form into editable text via scanning and digitization.

You may utilize the text from the produced document in your preferred word processor or desktop publishing tool. OmniPage OCR for Windows has just been upgraded by Nuance Communications, the company behind the well-known Dragon Text-to-Speech software. Users may use OmniPage 18 to scan and highlight non-searchable text and picture documents and turn them into editable CSV files using various tools.

Efficacy and Reliability

There is no way to modify the text captured by scanners, digital cameras, tablets, and smartphones. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of converting non-editable scanned pictures and PDF documents into ASCII characters that may be read and updated in a word processor or spreadsheet program.

Many specific capabilities are available in OmniPage 18 for this purpose. More than 125 languages are recognized, and other digital formats such as PDF, CSV, DOCX, and DOCX. It can also handle files stored as RTF or WRI. Several image formats are supported, including TIF/PCX/BMP/JPG/GIF/PNG/XPS/PDF/XPS. OmniPage 18 allows you to convert images-only or documents with some content into searchable PDFs.

Affordability

The CD-ROM User's Guide explains the program's many settings and adjustable features. When you open the OmniPage 18 Start Page, you'll find a Guidance and Resources option that gives rapid access to quick-read How-to-Guides and explains new program features. Getting Started information on subjects like Basic Steps, the OmniPage desktop, OmniPage Panels, and workflow processing may also be found in the program's Help menu.

Ingenious Use of Technology

It's hard to choose just a handful of OmniPage's great features to include in this short review. My iPad 2 took a picture of a printed page. Therefore I used the app to convert it. Converting the text and saving it as RTF took some time since I had to teach the software to recognize letters it had trouble detecting. Still, it was considerably faster than retyping the original content.

Additionally, OmniPage 18 can scan and convert several scanned documents at once. The ability to design custom workflows with predetermined stages and parameters so that documents may be handled quickly and effectively when such settings are required in other processes is also a big benefit.

School-Friendly

Regarding OCR, OmniPage 18 may be an application you don't want to buy for every machine in your school's computer lab. As a result, OmniPage 18 has several useful features for those who need to archive printed papers into searchable PDF files and others whose print materials, such as multi-page handbooks and assessment forms, contracts, and manuals, need to be converted into editable documents.

Teachers can create digital text materials that can be read aloud by OmniPage 18 or other text-to-speech readers, or the final document can be produced as a WAV formatted audio file for those who are visually impaired or wish to hear how their work sounds.

Cloud-Based Documents

You may now store and retrieve documents from various cloud storage providers, including Box.net, EverNote, Google Docs, Windows SkyDrive, and another 20. Nuance Cloud Connector is one of these services. Using my Google docs account, I established a lettered drive on my PC containing all of my Google files. Because of the lettered-drive structure, the process is the same as utilizing a folder on your hard drive–as long as you have a constant Internet connection–with OmniPage.

Open a document in the cloud, conduct OCR on it, and then save it back to the cloud. Batch-processing PDFs to make them searchable without erasing their annotations is possible with the help of a new function called eDiscovery Assistant. It works effectively and quickly if you're cautious about whatever options you select.

The Overall Rating

OmniPage 18 can scan and modify the print copy. When a document has been scanned, the layout may need to be rearranged or altered, but correcting a few identification problems is considerably less time-consuming than retyping an entire manuscript. Among the new features in OmniPage's newest release are workflow templates, better tools for image enhancement, batch processing, customized workflows, and support for scanning and transmitting documents directly to various prominent cloud services, including the Nuance Cloud Connector.

OmniPage 18's two editions are powerful enough to do most school and district-wide OCR chores regularly. If you already have a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat X (which can perform most of the PDF processing that OmniPage Pro 18 can do), or if you know you won't be using forms, the less-priced version is a good option for the Professional version.