ScanSoft's latest version of Omnipage Pro Office has added batch
processing facilities to allow it to be more broadly used in
corporate environments, writes Eric Doyle.
Omnipage Pro is an optical character recognition and PDF (Portable
Document File) conversion program. Paper document images scanned
into Omnipage are converted into a text format, such as Microsoft's
Word format, allowing them to be stored in a searchable form but
maintaining the layout of the original pages.
Similarly, PDF, the page rendering format popularised by Adobe's
Acrobat software, can be converted into Word document format. New
features allow searchable PDFs to be created from scanned documents
and adds the ability to output in XML format to bring the system
into line with open standards.
Support for XML also means document storage meets the browser-based
Web services standard, providing a more-easily searched document
and at least a first step to rendering the pages as HTML pages for
Web sites.