ScanSoft OmniPage - ( v. 16 ) - complete package - 1 user - CD - Win - English - United States

Waste of money. Didn't work and Nuance customer service wanted to charge me for calling about a product that wouldn't even install. Since then, I bought Fine Reader 9.0 which i got at a steep discount by providing proof I had bought the junk called OmniPage 16. Had and have no problems with Fine Reader and am amazed at how well and what it reads with so much accuracy.The pity is that I owned OmniPage OCR software for years, as far back when it was Caere and kept updating. Then along came Nuance and when it hit version 15, the company's attitude seemed to become anti-customer. So I went elsewhere and stayed there. I knew OmniPage as a fine product. I never really had to ask for customer support except once when I wanted to move version 12 to a new computer and got fast effective help with that. My advice now is stay away from them.

I bought this product last year, "upgrading" from Abby Fine Reader (had a very old version).Although it seems very accurate at faithfully reproducing words, there are 2 things I really dislike:1. You can't scan just part of a page, which means if there are pictures on the scanned page, you have to delete them all if you just want the text.2. When you send the text to Word and then try to change the font & size, you get some weird text - it's not all the same (?maybe a Word problem).So, if I want to email a news article to a friend, I find myself just scanning it as a .jpeg picture to avoid the hassle of using Omnipage 16.I eventually will get another OCR and I think I will go back to Abby.

I purchased this software as one component of a home electronic document management system---an autofeeding/duplexing document scanner, a 1TB hard drive to hold the scans, a decent shredder to dispose of papers once they were scanned, and OmniPage 16 to convert the scans from "image-type" PDFs to "searchable-type" PDFs. My goal was to finally stop filing in a filing cabinet all of the many papers I need to keep---credit card statements, receipts, etc.---and instead capture electronic scans of them then shredding the originals. Having the scans OCRed would allow me to search for text within the documents if I needed to find a document out of the many thousands I plan to scan over the years.Let's start with the good: OmniPage 16 certainly converts images of text into search-recognizable text, and can save the resulting document in PDF format. This process also reduced the file size as well, so OCRing then deleting the original scan will save some hard drive space. The package does extremely well at recognizing text, and you can instruct it to learn unrecognized words by adding them to its dictionary. Prior to buying OmniPage 16 I tried a cheaper shareware version, and that didn't even recognize half the words in the scan. With OmniPage 16, text recognition is not a concern.Now, the downside. There are actually three issues I've had with the product. The most significant concern is the tendency for the program to simply close without warning. I've seen this happen in two scenarios---if you select too many documents simultaneously to OCR, and if performing too many consecutive OCR jobs without a break. In these two situations the program will simply close without warning. The second issue is the inability to save non-alphanumeric text strings into the dictionary. On some documents, the same string of asterisks or dashes appear, and OmniPage 16 will always recognize it as an unknown word. Unfortunately you cannot add that string into the dictionary so it won't keep coming up unrecognized. The third issue I've encountered is the tendency for the software to think noncharacters are words. It picks up the corners of shapes, dot patterns, and other graphic elements as unknown words that have to be ignored each and every time.Lastly of note, although not an issue, is a feature I would like to have seen. That cheaper shareware I mentioned earlier? It would not only save the OCRed version into a target folder, it would also move the original version into a different target folder as well. OmniPage 16 doesn't do this; instead it leaves the original version of a completed document right where it was. This means I have to move it out manually so I can continue OCRing the remaining docs in the folder. You might wonder why I don't just OCR all of the documents in the original folder, but if you see my first downside issue you'll know why.All in all, despite its shortcomings, it's still the best there is.

Great