bit-tech Shopping: Nuance OmniPage Pro 12 Office (Full)

• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Windows 98
• Microsoft Windows ME
• Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
• Microsoft Windows XP

Rating: 10

Time with product: 5 Months

Strengths: Allows me to convert many types of documents quickly.

Weaknesses:

Summary: I have saved so much time taking paper documents and converting them over to a digital format with this software. For quick conversions, I'm able to use the quick one button OCR button and scan or convert. The accuracy has been awesome.

Rating: 2

Time with product: 30 Days

Strengths: It can batch OCR image files to .pdf "image with text", when it works.

Weaknesses: Buggy program always crashes at random points in conversion process to .pdf, to the point of being totally unusable for the batch process for which it was designed.

Summary: Here we are in the year 2003, and software developers still haven't figured out how to gracefully exit their programs when the unexpected happens. Ominpage Pro 12 simply crashes when dealing with Adobe Acrobat .pdf. Review the user groups on Scansoft's website, and you will see two major problems with its Acrobat compatibility. The first is when using Scansoft on an existing .pdf image file. Importing the .pdf file, capturing the text, and saving the file as .pdf "image with text" (which is supposed to save the ORIGINAL image with searchable background text) causes the image to degrade. Don't ask me why, but the image in the output file is not the same quality as the imported .pdf image. So to work around this issue, I started scanning our documents into .tif format (600x600) on our high speed scanner, and then importing the .tifs into Scansoft, for conversion to .pdf "image with text". The resulting .pdf files were graphically sharper than when I had imported existing .pdf files. The big problem is that running the Omnipage Pro 12 "Schedule OCR" on the folder of .tif files, Omnipage Pro 12 simply crashes at random places in the conversion process. No graceful exit. No warning. To summarize, Scansoft's Omnipage Pro 12 is inadequate to save files as .pdf "image with text". Any other .pdf format is inadequate, in my opinion, since you either lose the original graphic to malformed text ("replace image with text"), or don't have a searchable document ("image only").