Anyone using a ScanSnap scanner with OmniPage Pro 15?

[Rich13]

Hi folks. I work in a home office with no scanning and no OCR capability. It was recommended that I get a Fujitsu ScanSnap S500 scanner and OmniPage Pro 15 for OCR capabilities. The scanner does not support TWAIN. OmniPage Pro 15 works with any TWAIN-compatible scanner. Each has features that I really like and the total price is in my range.

I am told that I can scan a document, save it on my laptop, then open OmniPage Pro 15 and process the document. It would be the same result as if the products were compatible, just a few extra steps. Does anyone have experience doing this? Have you encountered any problems? Any reason this wouldn't work?

Thanks!

Rich

 

[PRPhx]

Doing a google search for that particular scanner, I found that the S500 also comes with Abbyy FineReader. This OCR program will directly covert your documents to word/excel/etc. I've tried FineReader in the past and it works fairly well, as long as your documents aren't overly complex (it didn't do a very good job converting a yellow page out of the phone book, but that's another story).

I *THINK* the steps you are talking about would be the same UNLESS you have software that would take the scanned document and do any kind of conversion.

Also looking at the specs, this scanner does deskewing, which can be important, as this will help reduce the size of the file (It takes a scanned page that looks like it isn't straight and makes it striaght up and down).

One feature that seems to be missing is the ability to despeckle or remove large dots, which again, can add to the file size and make the page look bad.

Otherwise it looks like a descent set up.

 

[NoCalAdmin]

I concur with PRPhx.

The only issues I've had are with tables getting converted correctly. Be careful of using tables and different styles

 

[Rich13]

Thanks for the responses.

PRPhx - I spent some time on the phone with Fujitsu yesterday, and a tech rep said that OmniPage Pro 15 is a stronger OCR engine than ABBYY FineReader. To me, that translates to less time cleaning-up documents (if the ScanSnap/OmniPage solution is doable). I'd gladly take a few extra steps on the front-end to save proofreading and editing on the backend.

NoCalAdmin - you use this same configuration (ScanSnap S500 and OmniPage Pro 15)? It's great to know of someone using this config. Any other issues besides columns? I deal mostly with contract documents - lots of words, few charts and columns. Most of the stuff that I process comes to me as data files (.pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt), which is what attracted me to OmniPage Pro 15. I have heard good things about the conversion utilities. Any further info that you can share about what you like and don't like about this config would be very much appreciated.

Rich

 

[NoCalAdmin]

I support a number of users who have Omni15 running. You shouldn't have many issues. try to train Omni early on, it take the users a few minutes, but you can train it to reconize a bunch of characters, some types of style and basic tables. If you take the time to 'train' it early on it'll save you sooooooooo much time and energy. If you don't you'll battle large or complicated documents.

I deal with a lot of medical symbols and having it trained to reconize them has saved my staff and I hours and hours of time NOT having to assist these users.

Good Luck.
Tom

 

[PRPhx]

Rich,
I suppose they are both ok pieces of software. However, IF you REALLY need high quality OCR, the best way to do it is with a high quality scanner, and a product called Virtual Rescan (VRS). This product will HIGHLY clean your document before you run it thru OCR.

I work in a scanning department at a large company. OCR is at best, a real pain in the butt. Your scanned images have to be of VERY high quality to get good results. Thank goodness we do very little OCR at the moment. But we also do more than just scan documents. They must also be indexed and then sent to storage (called release, were the index info is stored in a SQL Server table, and the document (a collection of pages) is stored on a hard drive and eventually to permanent storage).

Also, to save yourself some frustration, invest in the most powerful computer you can. The fastest processor with lots of RAM will really help in your processing. If you have a fairly low volume to scan and process, this may not be as big a deal.