Nuance Omnipage 18 OCR software

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of changing a scanned picture of a page of text, into a page of text that's editable in a word processor, or a searchable PDF file.

If any brand name is associated with it, it's Omnipage, now on to version 18 and with several innovations.

The program is simply designed, showing thumbnails of documents on the left, the current page image in the centre and the ‘proof-reader', where you deal with any recognition queries, as a pop-up window over the top.

There are large buttons for the four stages of recognition: load, recognise, proof-read and save, at the top of the screen.

It recognised simple text well, and correctly recognised a high percentage of words. Product names and other words that don't appear in the built-in dictionary have to be manually assessed in the proof-reader window, but this was straightforward. Like previous versions, it was confused by apostrophes, with even the word ‘it's' being queried occasionally.

Omnipage also had some problems with the layout of more complex pages, such as when converting from PDF to a Word document. The text came through OK, but the positioning of text boxes was hit-and-miss.

New features include improved speckle detection, which removes marks from documents that have been poorly photocopied or scanned. It will also automatically remove hole-punch marks and rough borders, all of which help to increase conversion accuracy.

The new edition continues to increase the sources that can be used for incoming documents, the latest being mobile-phone and tablet-computer cameras.

Snap a picture of a document and, providing your phone's camera has a resolution of at least two megapixels, the program should be able to create a text document from the file. It's important to take the photo as squarely on the page as possible.

The program will now convert files stored in online services such as Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote, depositing the converted version back with the same online services.

If you have a lot of documents on paper or to be converted from the wrong file format, Omnipage is the best bet to convert them into something more useful.