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Nuance OmniPage Professional 18

30.08.2011
Nuance Omnipage Professional 18 provides a powerful means of converting a scanned document into an editable file. But this software ($500 as of August 27, 2011) is saddled with an interface that's so tortured, the program makes CAD software seem easy to understand by comparison.

Even after reading (and rereading) the instructions, I found myself struggling to understand Nuance's intended workflow--or workflows, really. If you decide to follow one of Nuance's workflows, you must select one from a drop-down list of 13 different options, and some are very similar. For example, you can go with 'camera image to [Microsoft] Word', 'camera image to Excel', or 'camera image to searchable PDF', or you can choose 'PDF or scanned document to PDF', or 'PDF or scanned document to searchable PDF'. But wouldn't it be easier just to supply a source button and an output-format button?

Many operations in the application happen in discrete windows. For instance, to specify areas of a document that contain graphics, text, or tables, you use a Page Image window, with its own commands; to edit the text of a processed document, you must work in the Text Editor window. To clean up graphical elements, you must click an Image Enhancement icon in the Page Image window, and it pops up a child window (a window that you can't access any other way). The same icon appears in the child window, too, but clicking it there pops up the Help dialog box.

The application is rife with inconsistencies. You can find standard undo and redo commands under the edit menu (or in keyboard shortcuts) when you're in the application's main window--but they disappear if you're using certain modes within the application, such as the image enhancement mode, where you're expected to click a reset button to start over if you don't like the results of your edits. And the OCR Proofreader tool, which you use for accepting and rejecting recognized text, has no undo function.

Keyboard and mouse shortcuts for zooming don't work in Omnipage Professional 18. One window has zoom icons, but another important window does not; you can access a zoom command via right-clicking, but only in certain areas.

Those examples are only the beginning. Ultimately the interface will get the job done, but at times it confuses and confounds--something one wouldn't expect on version 18 of a product.