Review by Matt Morgan

OmniPage has for years been the standard when it comes to OCR software. While there are other good OCR software solutions out there, OmniPage has consistently been considered the best. I was excited about the opportunity to work with it any while it is good software I found it to be a little ornery and quirky on occasion.

Installation was not smooth on my system. When I inserted the DVD, the installer promptly updated several support application layers such as .NET 4.0 and Microsoft’s XML services layer. It was nice to see all of these things installing sequentially, but I was given no option at all about whether or not I wanted them installed, even though some of these were already installed on my system. Once it reached the actual installation for OmniPage itself, though, the installer completely hung. I was unable to eject the DVD and I finally was forced to do a hard shutdown and power-on just to get my system usable again, after which the installer allowed OmniPage to install without argument. I am not sure what happened that caused the installer hang and I was unable to reproduce it.

I launched OmniPage without an active internet connection and during the start-up it asked to be activated via the internet. Also, 4 browser windows opened.

Once through the start-up OmniPage was ready to work. I selected a PDF file for processing and was given several options for translation so I selected MS Word format and let it go. It took quite a bit of time to process, and it prompted me frequently on spelling suggestions (this PDF was a laptop disassembly manual so it flagged multiple technical terms and abbreviations - my fault). I rejected all changes and let it finish. While it worked I was able to change the view to get a workflow view as well as an overview of the resulting document. The multiple views provided an interesting look at various states of my document.

Once the corrections were all through it offered to save the document and I selected a name and saved it, and the result was an empty file. I suspect the problem was that it opened the file for writing but really was not done with the conversion when the output file was created. This is a good thing to keep in mind - patience is required while conversion is running.

The software came with no printed manuals at all, just the DVD.

OmniPage is powerful software and it’s really straightforward to use. It has some good features and it simplifies the process of translating image files to text. I found it to be a little temperamental though, and not without fault.