![]() ![]() OmniPage also retains colour for text and backgrounds, and it can maintain text alignment and cell styles in tables, which can save a lot of reformatting woes later. The program automatically preserves page layouts, putting boxes around each type design element so the user can deal with the element separately or rearrange the layout on the fly. There is a "deskew" process, which straightens out documents that have not been inserted perfectly into the scanner (this feature is new to version 11). Greater magic lurks in OmniPage's subtler features. Still, this is a lot less work than having to type the document into a computer by hand, a process that can be just as error-ridden, or perhaps more so. Any document like this will average about three errors per page, which means OmniPage users will have to exercise some vigilance when proofing the results. This sounds wonderful - and it is - but it stops just short of the miraculous when you realize that a standard sheet of letter paper, filled with double-spaced type, will run 300 words. In fact, the ScanSoft people say OmniPage is some 99.4 per cent accurate. But OmniPage can sort these issues out automatically, and the results are eerily accurate. This became a headache when it came to documents created with multiple typefaces and fonts, which is just about any document created with flair and intelligence these days. ![]() Old versions of optical character reading (OCR) software had to be programmed ahead of time to let them know which font they would be dealing with: serif or sanserif, or whether the text is bold or roman or italic. In this way it works much like spell-checking programs do, but the process includes graphic elements and characters it mistranslates, such as those odd ASCII characters like pound signs and daggers that can vary wildly from font to font. This last part is particularly interesting: A process ScanSoft calls IntelliTrain can be "trained" to fix transliteration errors ahead of human proofreading. Slip a document into a scanner, run the file through OmniPage, and watch as it not only "reads" the document, but also checks spelling, grammar and flags words it doesn't recognize. Not only can these programs make the changeover simpler, they can actually give some control over the entire process, a satisfying feeling that you're actually performing some dark ritual with grace and ease. OmniPage (an optical character reader), OmniForm (a form-generating program), and PaperPort (a file system for digital documents) are not only useful for the task, but also time-saving marvels as well. If that really is the case, then three products from ScanSoft can make the transition considerably easier. ![]() This could take a lot of time, given the reluctance of people to overhaul systems that have worked, for better or worse, for decades. If it's balance we need, then the problem probably just comes down to the Herculean task of transferring a chunk of our paperwork into computers. More likely, however, is that what we dislike is the sheer volume of paper we have to process, and would dearly love to find some sort of balance between working with purely digital documents and paper ones. This dream of the early years of the computer revolution may have simply been the victim of our all-too-human resistance to change from something as comforting as scribbling on paper. It's not entirely clear why the paperless office has never become a reality. ![]()
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