In this particular case it's easy to see why OmniPage flagged the word "INORES" as suspect. In the screen shot below I option-double-clicked the word "INORES" to bring up a closeup of the original image.
"Option-double-clicking" a word in the text view will bring up a floating window showing a closeup image of the original word. OmniPage highlights suspect words in green and rejected words in red. If you scan multi-page documents, the "Thumbnail View" makes it easy to navigate through, reorder, or delete pages from the document.Īny OCR program is incomplete without a spell checker and some means of comparing the recognized text against the scanned image.
A large screen is required to see full page Image and Text windows simultaneously, but for the average person with a 15" screen, the Smart Windows feature is a very nice compromise. "Smart Windows" will automatically resize the Image or Text windows and show or hide palettes, depending on which window is active. If the original contains handwritten notes, stray marks, or other types of noise, you'll appreciate this feature. The Auto button launches a scan or loads an image, then OmniPage decides which elements are text and which are graphics, performs OCR, and saves the file in a variety of common word processing formats.Ī "noise reduction" feature (actually a standard erase tool), allows you to erase unwanted artifacts before OCR.
OmniPage Pro is one of the earliest OCR programs offered, so Caere has had time to develop a well-refined user interface that compares favorably to several competitors.With OmniPage Pro's AutoOCR toolbar, OCR is as simple as clicking on a button.
In addition to installing an OmniPage folder, an entry is placed in the Apple menu and a scanner driver is placed in the Extensions folder. Installing OmniPage from CD was very quick and simple.
If you're a good typist, it may be faster to type in a page or two of text rather than OCR at 99% accuracy and manually correct the mistakes.Īs a long-time user of OmniPage Pro 2.12, I felt it was time to upgrade to take full advantage of a PowerMac 8600. The accuracy drops rapidly when the scanned document is not an original. A 99% OCR accuracy rate results in 1 bad character out of 100 characters, or 1 bad word every 20 words, or 1 bad word every other line. Most text will have on average 5 characters per word and 11 words per Lest you think 99% accuracy is acceptable, consider the following example. A scanning accuracy of 99% means 99 out of 100 characters will be recognized correctly.
I have even used OCR software to offer commercial scanning services.Īccuracy refers to how well the OCR program recognizes text. OCR can convert fax documents to text documents. Law offices use OCR to convert hard copy documents to word processing documents. With a bit of training, an OCR program can recognize rarely used characters, such as "oe" and "Ø". So what does an OCR program give you? For a moderately small sum of money, you get a program that recognizes almost any printed textual material. If you (humans are the most efficient OCR device) have trouble reading the text, don't expect an OCR program to do any better.
In the real world, the original is often faded, smudged, wrinkled, or otherwise difficult to read. In a perfect world, each scan would result in a perfect image that could be OCRed with 100% accuracy. Optical Character Recognition will take the bitmap image and convert images of text into editable characters. When a scanner captures an image of a text document, it records the page only as a bitmap image-a pattern of dots. Macintosh with a 68020 or higher, or Power Macintoshĭirectly supports 13 brands of scanners consisting of 37 models.