scanning and ocr

I have been an OmniPage user for several years and find version 14 by far the easiest and most powerful version. Its ease of busting .pdf files is incredible. Although it took me a few hours of playing with the software to understand some of its nuances, I find that I can scan, edit, and transfer into Word with ease. If I'm scanning a clean copy of a document, with my adf on my scanner, I can very easily scan in a multipage document, OCR it, organize it, and save to Word. Once in Word it is easy to convert the .rtf to .doc, and wham! it is ready to go.

I have some difficulty in editing graphics linked to text in multiple columns once it is in Word, but it is becaue I don't understand the complexities of how Word does formatting, not because of any deficiencies in OmniPage 14.

Yes, there is a learning curve with the program, but that is to be expected when purchasing or upgrading any software, isn't it?

Over the years, Scansoft has developed an ugly reputation for shipping software before its prime (Omnipage Pro 12 locked up under Windows XP), but this version runs clean out of the box and the accuracy is excellent.

The interface is still not user-friendly, so you'll spend a lot of time trying to understand it. The translation from PDF into Word works sporadically. In some cases, I had to translate from PDF into TIFF and then back into Word using OCR.

All in all, a useful program, but could be better.