All of that might be forgiven if Omnipage Professional 18 were to excel at its main function: optical character recognition. The application's success depends on the type of document (of course). But I found that it also depends on what you're using to .

I scanned a slew of different documents using my , with varying results. Nuance claims a 67 percent increase in layout accuracy and an 18 percent increase in character accuracy--and I was impressed by the accuracy that Omnipage 18 was able to achieve with an old, multilanguage manual (for a tripod) composed of mangled French-to-English translations, mostly in 7-point type (Omnipage can recognize text in several languages, though it won't translate for you). Only a couple of text errors cropped up, but the software also made a column more narrow than it should have been, causing some text overflow in the resulting document. The problems were easy to fix in Microsoft Word.

Scanning a Comcast bill with plenty of graphics and logos proved more challenging, though, especially when I set aside the scanner and tried using my Motorola Droid smartphone's built-in camera to capture an image of the bill. Text boxes overlapped or cut off, fonts in the same area were mixed, and some sentences simply came out wrong: 'contact us at vamoomosatoom' instead of 'Contact us: @www.comcast.com', for example.

Nuance touts new scanner-enhancement tools that are supposed to improve the quality of poorly scanned images and even whiteboard content; you can use a new Whiteboard Enhancement tool in the Image Enhancement window, but I didn't get much improvement in OCR accuracy after applying it (though it did make my bill's background look much nicer). On the other hand, I was able to use some of Omnipage's other tools to deskew a document and make other adjustments prior to its OCR scan, and that significantly improved the accuracy.