Nuance touts new scanner-enhancement tools that are supposed to improve the quality of poorly scanned images and even whiteboard content you can use a new Whiteboard Enhancement tool in the Image Enhancement window, but I didn’t get much improvement in OCR accuracy after applying it (though it did make my bill’s background look much nicer). Text boxes overlapped or cut off, fonts in the same area were mixed, and some sentences simply came out wrong: ‘contact us at vamoomosatoom’ instead of ‘Contact us: for example. Scanning a Comcast bill with plenty of graphics and logos proved more challenging, though, especially when I set aside the scanner and tried using my Motorola Droid smartphone’s built-in camera to capture an image of the bill. The problems were easy to fix in Microsoft Word. Only a couple of text errors cropped up, but the software also made a column more narrow than it should have been, causing some text overflow in the resulting document. Nuance claims a 67 percent increase in layout accuracy and an 18 percent increase in character accuracy–and I was impressed by the accuracy that Omni was able to achieve with an old, multilanguage manual (for a tripod) composed of mangled French-to-English translations, mostly in 7-point type (OmniPage can recognize text in several languages, though it won’t translate for you). I scanned a slew of different documents using my Canon CanoScan 9000F, with varying results. The same icon appears in the child window, too, but clicking it there pops up the Help dialog box. To clean up graphical elements, you must click an Image Enhancement icon in the Page Image window, and it pops up a child window (a window that you can’t access any other way). For instance, to specify areas of a document that contain graphics, text, or tables, you use a Page Image window, with its own commands to edit the text of a processed document, you must work in the Text Editor window. Many operations in the application happen in discrete windows. But wouldn’t it be easier just to supply a source button and an output-format button? For example, you can go with ‘camera image to Word’, ‘camera image to Excel’, or ‘camera image to searchable PDF’, or you can choose ‘PDF or scanned document to PDF’, or ‘PDF or scanned document to searchable PDF’. If you decide to follow one of Nuance’s workflows, you must select one from a drop-down list of 13 different options, and some are very similar. But this optical character recognition software ($500 as of August 27, 2011) is saddled with an interface that’s so tortured, the program makes CAD software seem easy to understand by comparison.Įven after reading (and rereading) the instructions, I found myself struggling to understand Nuance’s intended workflow–or workflows, really. Nuance OmniPage Professional 18 provides a powerful means of converting a scanned document into an editable file.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |