Caere claims "using a scanner, you'll never retype another document." After working with the program for a few hours, I've found its not just a claim. OmniPagePro works.
Desktop publishers, authors, artists, and anyone who works with text or images (especially in the sense of having to redo or edit) will find this program accurate and easy to use. They say it's 99% accurate. I found it's close to 99% accurate, even on the hard stuff, columns, bad typing, heavy background, and etc.
System requirements, 386 and above, 8 MG RAM minimum, 12 MG hard disk space, 4 MG windows virtual memory, DOS 5.0 and above, Windows 3.1 and above, (works with Windows 95) VGA or SVGA 256 color monitor. You will really need more memory, I looked at the possible error messages in the back of the manual. Most have to do with not enough RAM or not enough virtual memory.
I'm using a Pentium 90 with 32 MG RAM, 1 GB hard drive with a PageWIZ scanner. It was an easy 6 disk installation with no surprises. The only problem I had was covered in the manual. I found it in the manual (gray scale scanners use the manual brightness setting) after I called Caere technical support. They were very helpful and didn't laugh at my dumb, at least not while I was on the phone.
The manual seems complete. So far I haven't found any of those "everybody knows it, so we didn't put it in the manual" problems, and the on-line help is really helpful.
I used a previous version (limited) to scan in two of my books and a book by another minister for editing. I had to reformat every page of mine, and since his was very poorly typed, every paragraph of his. OmniPagePro 6.0's True Page Recognition lets you retain text and graphics in their original font and layout. This feature will save me many, many hours in the future.
The program is very easy to use, just click on AUTO and your image appears. Use the Image Verifier ( it works like a spell checker and learns as you go) to zip on through the document. Words, OmniPagePro is not sure of, turn green. It took me less than 2 minutes to finish a page. You can Direct Input into more than 50 windows applications, Word Perfect, Word, Excel, Lotus, and etc. or use the one click Auto Paste feature. The AnyFax technology optimizes on line fax recognition. You can recognize, edit and save as a text or image file any fax you receive.
Image Assistant has so many features I haven't tried them all, yet. One very neat feature is the Cartoon Filter where I can turn photographs into line drawings, like the Wall Street Journal pictures. The Edit Tools allow you to do virtually anything to your image, sharpen, blur, color, change color, mask, filter, change it to a half tone, make 4 color separations, and more. And so far, with no unfunny surprises. Most people will find the Image Assisant manual easy, but necessary.
The mail order price is $549.95. The local price is $499.68. It is in stock locally, they had one copy, when I called.
I am very pleased with OmniPagePro and recommend it highly, especially to the less knowledgeable or new to the computer scene, because it is so easy to use.
(Dave’s note: competitive upgrade prices are around $129.00)