Omnipage Pro 12 Office Edition

The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM.

Both do a good job of scanning. FR6 offers the option of more control over the scanning process, but OP12 generally does well with its automatic settings.

OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff, at least on my system. It will suddenly crash with no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages.

Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. FR6 is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof.

Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up.

In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not altogether immune to this, but does it significantly less often.

FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed.

Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary.

Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product.

As I say, OP12 is a good product and will no doubt serve many people well. If it comes free or at a very low price my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper.

Will O'Neil

PS: I should remark that in the past I have complained of a few shortcomings in FR6 relating to scanning. I have now concluded that these were a result of scanner problems and/or some faulty settings on my part.