I installed OmniPage Pro X 10 upgrade for Macintosh on a new G4 PowerBook running OS 10.3 Panther. The installation went smoothly. I have used OmniPage Pro 8.01 for Macintosh for years, and found that it generally did a good job. I expected the new version to be at least as good, but I found some problems with OmniPage Pro X 10.
ScanSoft claims that OmniPage Pro X works with all TWAIN compliant devices, and allows direct scanning into OmniPage, but it wouldn't do this from my Brother scanner. I have to use one of their “workarounds†by scanning pages into Apple's Image Capture (comes free with Mac OS X, and saves page scans as TIFF files), then load these images into OmniPage.
I find that both loading the TIFF file page scans, and scanning the text is much slower for OmniPage Pro X than for OmniPage Pro 8 - to the point of being annoying. ScanSoft claims that Pro X has much improved OCR accuracy, but my experience has been that if it is more accurate it is only moderately so. It still can't properly interpret font sizes, heading and indent formats.
A few other things were particularly annoying:
- Pro X throws up a dialog box requesting you to set Zoning Instructions for every page scan! When you are scanning dozens of pages this is a real time waster. Pro 8 never had this, and, given that my Zoning Instructions are always the same, it should be able to be turned off with a Preferences setting.
- Pro X does not automatically expand the Text View window to allow you to see all of the scanned text after it has been recognized like Pro 8 did. You must drag the window border, or slide window buttons back and forth, every time you want to look at what you just scanned. And there is this odd glitch that doesn't show the border being moved as you drag it - you must release the mouse button then the border shows where you just dragged it to.
- Command - + does not allow you to increase the scanned text size in the Text View window (so that you can read it) like Pro 8 did.
- ScanSoft free support allows only one call for one issue, then they cut you off and demand $20 for any other issue support thereafter - a bad policy for a company trying to market a complicated and awkward piece of software.
I have stopped using OmniPage Pro X 10. The solution I have settled on is to scan pages with Apple's Image Capture, and do OCR with OmniPage Pro 8.01 running under the OS X Classic environment. I just finished a long document, and this arrangement worked fine. OmniPage 8 has reasonably good character recognition accuracy.