Omnipage : Java Glossary

Advantages

• It is much faster and accurate that earlier OCR software.
• The results of scanning a book were extremely good. It can compensate for coloured backgrounds. The only touch-ups needed were where the auto-crop had pruned off a partial letter. It is much faster than earlier generations of OCR, but part of that is faster hardware.

Disadvantages

• When scanning a book, it often scrambles the order of the paragraphs. Even if I hold its hand and show it the regions to scan, it reverses the left and right hand pages. It has absolutely no common sense.
• It is not easy, when scanning a book, to separate out the illustrations as pngs for later inclusion in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
• The HTML it generates is useless, like something MSWord would generate, with hundreds of pointless inline style tags.
• When scanning a book, you can’t just press scan on the scanner when you have the next page ready. You must return to the computer and click two buttons.
• Purchasing it was the worst online purchase ordeal of my life. It became comic it was so utterly inept. More on that later.
• It locks itself into your current computer configuration. It will not run on anything else.
• Clicking the Omnipage icon does nothing but start the program in the right hand task bar. You must actually trigger it from there with a right click.
• There is no button to just do OCR from the scanner. You must lie to you that you are importing into word then abort and start at scan.
• I have not yet figured out how to get it to remove dashes at the end of line where words were split. I have written a little Java program to tidy the output into rudimentary HTML.

Tips

• When you are correcting text Omnipage cannot discern, it will throw away all your corrections unless you click change after each one.
• Test your scanner with other simpler software first to at least make sure the cabling and ports are working. Omnipage will send you off on a goose chase if something simple like that is not working.
• Don’t pay full list. Nuance offers periodic 50% off sales.
• Omnipage will drive you nuts. It sometimes ignores zones. It sometimes puts information from other pages into the document for the current page. It does not remember your zones from page to page. It keeps hiding the display where you mark zones.

Purchasing Omnipage 18

Purchasing it was a nightmare. The web form erased my order form three times. It kept increasing the number of copies I was ordering. Normally you download a product from a public URL (Uniform Resource Locator). You can take as many tries as you need to download it. Then when you buy it, all you get is a short activation key. Nuance gives you only one shot to download the 500 MB file. (Their Dragon product is even worse at 3 GB). My download immediately aborted and crashed my Opera browser so thoroughly it would not run again until I reinstalled it (Opera’s fault). To contact anyone at Nuance you must login. However, you can’t login until you are validated. Catch 22. If something goes wrong with the validation, you cannot contact Nuance for help. I never got any validation emails. However, if you wander around the Nuance website, every once in a while a picture of a live human floats up with an offer of online chat. This person will ask you a half a dozen questions, then say they are not qualified to help. They offer a phone number where this process repeats, with clerks asking you the same questions over and over all in a charming but difficult-to-understand Filipino accent. Conversely, they had equal difficulty understanding me. Eventually one clerk sent me a form letter explaining how to get a second try at the download. I downloaded successfully with Chrome. Surely failed downloads are a common problem. All clerks should be trained to send the email on hearing failed download. When clerks ask the standard questions they should type the answers into a caller record that follows as the call in transferred. Better still, download from findable public URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) and include it in the invoice in case it is ever lost. The registration process was similarly incompetent. I gave up.

When the program installed it replaced the C++ 2005 and 2010 runtimes with obsolete versions. Microsoft update automatically corrected the problem. The program did not work with the Canon MP-210. Troubleshooting was hampered by the fact during the install, the program configured itself to run only on one machine. I could not try it on the laptop. I eventually got it going. The problem was with the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port.

I still have not been able to register. I accumulated 3 passwords + a registration key during the purchase. When I try any of them, the screen erases my typing and displays the instructions in Chinese. It has got to the point my frustration is funny. Could anyone from Nuance possibly have done a test purchase?

electronic link to Omnipage 18 OCR Software

	recommend electronic⇒Omnipage 18 OCR Software
	asin	B004YTG200
Very accurate OCR software. Not only captures the text, captures the formatting. It will scan text in graphics files. Can export the results in 32 different formats including text, Kindle, Word, Excel, PDF or speech file. The price varies wildly. Shop around. features. It works with any Twain or ISIS scanner.
Online electronic stores carrying Omnipage 18 OCR Software amazon.com bestbuy.ca amazon.ca canadacomputers.com amazon.de ncix.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr www.staples.ca amazon.it tigerdirect.ca amazon.co.uk bestbuy.com junglee.com ncixus.com other stores newegg.com www.staples.com tigerdirect.com
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock