I am supposed to be getting 17 as soon as my employer finishes the paperwork. However, I used to be the tech support lead for OmniPage, so I know the older versions well.
Meanwhile, for those of you with 14, 15 or 16, try these ideas: * Delete or rename the JAWS scripts. They are for OmniPage 10 and will not work as well as the default scripts for using the program. * If OmniPage doesn't seem to work with your scanner, stop trying and scan using another program. OmniPage just calls the scanner manufacturer's third-party drivers, and manufacturers often make crummy ones. Scan and save the results as TIFF. * Scan at 300 DPI with 100% scaling in black and white. OmniPage help, written by marketing and not tech support, claims other settings work, but the OCR engine is tuned to give best quality at those settings. OmniPage defaults to this -- most other software does not. * The main screen has a text view and an image view. Turn off the image view. Poke around the Alt-V View menu to turn off anything else you don't want. * The main screen is full of toollbars and buttons. Don't worry if JFW cannot read them, you can do everything through the menus or workflows. * Use alt-P to pull up the Process menu. From there choose "Get Page" and from that submenu, you can select whether to open a tiff file or scan a document. You cannot open an image file from the normal File Open dialog box. * Wait around for all the pages to load if you are bringing in an image file or start scanning, if that's how you are bringing a file in to OmniPage. * When the file is loaded (it's sometimes hard to tell when that's done) do alt-P for Process, then choose perform OCR. You'll get a menu of choices which you can enable or disable. You'll have to keep pulling it up each time you toggle any setting. When everything is the way you want it, select start -- this is all from submenus, not dialog boxes. * When OCR begins, a spell checker is also run as a separate thread. You can check spelling, which is pretty accessible or skip the step by closing the spell checker. You can close the spell checker by tabbing to Close because the spell checker steals the focus. This will not abort the OCR. * It can be difficult to know when the OCR is done. I just run it overnight. * When it completes, do Alt-P, for process, choose Export results and go through the menus the same way you did for OCR. You will be toggling settings, pulling up the menu again for each setting change. But it's all accessible with boxes either checked or unchecked. You will need to select Start to actually make anything happen. * Take the time to learn from the Help and trial and error how to use the work flows and batch manager. The dialogs are all accessible in 13, 14, 15 and 16 -- I use this program every day at work and know this for sure. If you set up a batch job properly, it can run overnight on a huge PDF or Tiff, and you can wake up to a new book ready to read. * If your version of OmniPage has no batch jobs or workflows you have the scaled-down trial version that gets sent out free with scanners. It has poor OCR and should be avoided! --Debee For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
