Nuance OMNIPAGE PRO 14, SCANSOFT OMNIPAGE PRO 14 User Manual

LEGAL NOTICES

Copyright © 2003 ScanSoft, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted, transcribed, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or translated into any language or computer language in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, magnetic, optical, chemical, manual, or otherwise, without prior written consent from ScanSoft, Inc., 9 Centennial Drive, Peabody, Massachusetts 01960. Printed in the United States of America and in Ireland.

The software described in this book is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license.

MPORTANT NOTICE

ScanSoft, Inc. provides this publication "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Some states or jurisdictions do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties in certain transactions; therefore, this statement may not apply to you. ScanSoft reserves the right to revise this publication and to make changes from time to time in the content hereof without obligation of ScanSoft to notify any person of such revision or changes.

RADEMARKS AND CREDITS

ScanSoft, OmniPage, OmniPage Pro, PaperPort, Pagis, True Page, Direct OCR, RealSpeak and ASR-1600 are registered trademarks or trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc., in the United States

and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the trademarks of their respective holders.

THIRD PARTY LICENSES/NOTICES

Please see acknowledgements/notices at the end of this guide.

ScanSoft, Inc.

9 Centennial Drive Peabody, MA 01960 U.S.A.

ScanSoft Belgium BVBA

Guldensporenpark 32 BE-9820 Merelbeke Belgium

Part Number 50-281A-10119

C ONTENTS

WELCOME 7

Using this Guide 8 Getting online Help 9

Online HTML Help 9 Context-Sensitive Help 9 Tech Notes 10 Glossary 10 When to go online 10

1INSTALLATION AND SETUP 11

System requirements 12 Installing OmniPage Pro 13 Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro 14 How to start the program 16 Registering your software 17 New features in OmniPage Pro 14 17

2INTRODUCTION 19

What is optical character recognition 20

OmniPage Pro’s OCR capabilities 20 Documents in OmniPage Pro 21 Basic processing steps 21

The OmniPage Desktop 22

The Menu bar 23 The Toolbars 23 The Image Panel 24 The Text Editor 24 The OmniPage Toolbox 25

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide iii

Managing documents 26

Thumbnails 26 Document Manager 27 Customizing Document Manager columns 28 Deleting pages from a document 28 Printing a document 29 Closing a document 29

OmniPage Documents 29

Why save to OPD 30 How to save to OPD 30 How to load an OPD 31

Settings 31

3PROCESSING DOCUMENTS 33

Quick Start Guide 34

Loading and recognizing sample image files 34

Scanning and recognizing a single page 34 Processing overview 36 Automatic processing 38

Stopping and restarting automatic processing 39 Manual processing 40 Combined processing 41 Processing with workflows 43 Processing from other applications 44

How to set up Direct OCR 44

How to use Direct OCR 45

How to use OmniPage Pro with PaperPort 46 Processing with the Batch Manager 47 Defining the source of page images 48

Input from image files 48

Input from scanner 49

Scanning with an ADF 50

Scanning without an ADF 51 Describing the layout of the document 51 Zones and backgrounds 53

Automatic zoning 53

iv Contents

Manual zoning 54

Zone types and properties 55

Working with zones 57

Speed zoning 59 Table grids in the image 59 Using zone templates 61

4PROOFING AND EDITING 63

The editor display and views 64 Proofreading OCR results 65 Verifying text 67 User dictionaries 68 Languages 69 Training 69

Manual training 70

IntelliTrain 70

Training files 71 Text and image editing 73 On-the-fly editing 75 Reading text aloud 76

5SAVING AND EXPORTING 79

Saving OmniPage Documents 80 Export Results button 80 Saving original images 81 Saving recognition results 82

Selecting a formatting level 83

Selecting converter options 85

Using multiple converters 86

Saving to PDF 88

Converting from PDF 89 Copying pages to Clipboard 89 Sending pages by mail 90 Other export targets 92

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide v

6WORKFLOWS 93

Workflows 94

Sample workflows 94

Running workflows 96 Workflow Assistant 98

Creating workflows 98

Modifying workflows 101 Batch Manager 101

Creating new jobs 102

Modifying jobs 103

Managing and running jobs 103 Watched folders 104 Barcode driven workflows 106 Voice recognition 107

7TECHNICAL INFORMATION 109

Troubleshooting 110

Solutions to try first 110

Testing OmniPage Pro 111

Increasing memory resources 112

Increasing disk space 112

Text does not get recognized properly 113

Problems with fax recognition 114

System or performance problems during OCR 114 Supported file types 115

File types for opening and saving images 115

File types for saving recognition results 116 Uninstalling the software 118

vi Contents

Welcome

Welcome to this OmniPage Pro® text recognition program, and thank you for choosing our software! The following documentation has been provided to help you get started and give you an overview of the program.

This User’s Guide

This guide introduces you to using OmniPage Pro 14. It includes installation and setup instructions, a description of the program’s commands and working areas, task-oriented instructions, ways to customize and control processing, and technical information. The guide is presented in PDF format, allowing you to use hyperlink jumps on cross-references and other navigation tools in your PDF viewer.

Online Help

OmniPage Pro’s online Help contains information on features, settings, and procedures. The online Help is provided as HTML help, and has been designed for quick and easy information retrieval. Comprehensive context-sensitive help aims to provide just enough assistance to let you keep working without delay. See “Getting online Help” on page 9.

Readme File

The Readme file contains last-minute information about the software. Please read it before using OmniPage Pro. To open this HTML file, choose Readme in the OmniPage Pro Installer or afterwards in the Help menu.

Scanning and other information

ScanSoft’s web site at www.scansoft.com provides timely information on the program. The Scanner Guide contains up-dated information about supported scanners and related issues; ScanSoft tests the 25 most widely

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 7

used scanner models. Access ScanSoft’s web site from the OmniPage Pro Installer or afterwards from the Help menu.

Using this Guide

This guide is written with the assumption that you know how to work in the Microsoft Windows environment. Please refer to your Windows documentation if you have questions about how to use dialog boxes, menu commands, scroll bars, drag and drop functionality, shortcut menus, and so on.

We also assume you are familiar with your scanner and its supporting software, and that the scanner is installed and working correctly before it is setup with OmniPage Pro 14. Please refer to the scanner’s own documentation as necessary.

The following conventions are used in this guide:

Bold Introduces new terms and presents sub-headings. Italic Names topics in the online Help system.

Presents longer option texts in dialog boxes.

8 Welcome

Non-serif

Presents file names: sample.tif

A note presents an item of additional information.

A tip presents ideas for using program features to accomplish specific tasks.

OmniPage Pro 14 Office is a version of the product designed for more intensive use and is tailored to office environments. Its added features are denoted through the guide by this symbol. For a concise listing, see “New features in OmniPage Pro 14” on page 17.

Getting online Help

In addition to using this guide, you can use OmniPage Pro’s online Help to learn about features, settings, and procedures. Online Help is available after you install OmniPage Pro.

Online HTML Help

Open OmniPage Pro’s online Help at its top level by choosing Help Topics at the top of the Help menu. This allows you to see topics arranged in a Table of Contents, search an alphabetical list of keywords or make full-text searches through the topics. Other items in the Help menu provide access to useful topics or web pages.

Press F1 as you are working with the program to see an online help topic relating to the current screen area, dialog box or warning message.

Context-Sensitive Help

You can get concise on-the-spot information in a popup window about a particular OmniPage Pro menu item, toolbar button, screen area or dialog box, in the following ways:

Click the Help tool in the Standard toolbar to get the help icon. Click this on any item on the desktop outside a dialog box or warning message.

Press Shift + F1 to get the same help icon. Use Shift + F1 to get contextsensitive help for shortcut menu items.

Click the question mark button in the upper right corner of a dialog box and then click an item in the dialog box to see the popup window.

Some dialog boxes or warning messages have their own Help button, or a help text. Click the button or the text to get information on the dialog or message box.

Click anywhere to remove a context-sensitive popup Help window.

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 9

Tech Notes

ScanSoft’s web site at www.scansoft.com contains Tech Notes on commonly reported issues using OmniPage Pro 14. Web pages may also offer assistance on the installation process and troubleshooting.

Glossary

This guide does not include a glossary. The online Help has a comprehensive glossary, with its own alphabetical index and a table of contents. Please consult it if you want to find the meaning of a term used in this guide or in the program.

When to go online

This guide concentrates on providing background understanding of program features, suggesting also what they can be useful for. The online Help provides mainly numbered procedures. Turn to online Help for the following items or for grater detail on the following topics:

◆ Keyboard guide

10 Welcome

◆ Settings guidelines

◆ Manual training

◆ Export Converter options

◆ Using the Text Editor

◆ On-the-fly zoning and editing

Chapter 1

Installation and setup

This chapter provides information on installing and starting OmniPage Pro 14. It presents the following topics:

◆ System requirements

◆ Installing OmniPage Pro

◆ Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro

◆ How to start the program

◆ Registering your software

◆ New features in OmniPage Pro 14

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 11

System requirements

The minimum requirements to install and run OmniPage Pro 14 are:

◆ A computer with an Intel

◆ Microsoft

Windows NT

Windows® 98 (from second edition), Windows Me,

4.0 (from Service Pack 6), Windows 2000 (from

Pentium® III processor or equivalent

Service Pack 2), Windows XP or Windows Server 2003

◆ Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with at least Service Pack 2

◆ 128MB of memory (RAM), 256MB recommended

◆ 135MB of free hard disk space for application and sample files

plus 40-45MB working space during installation. Additionally:

◆ 20-67 MB per RealSpeak

◆ 2 MB per ASR speech recognition language (15MB for 7 languages) *

◆ 18 MB for ScanSoft PDF Converter *

◆ 3.4 MB for ScanSoft PDF Printer Driver *

◆ 5MB for Microsoft Installer (MSI) if not present (it is included

module (343 MB for 9 languages)

in most Windows operating systems)

◆ Up to 5MB for system updates

◆ An SVGA monitor with 256 colors, but preferably 16-bit color

(called High Color in Windows 2000 and Medium Color in XP) and a resolution of at least 800 x 600 pixels

◆ A CD-ROM drive for installation

12 Installation and setup

◆ A Windows compatible pointing device

◆ A compatible scanner with its own scanner driver software, if you

plan to scan documents. See the Scanner Guide at ScanSoft’s web site (www.scansoft.com) for a list of supported scanners

◆ Web access is needed for product registration, Scanner Wizard

database updating and obtaining live updates for the program.

* Supplied with OmniPage Pro 14 Office only.

Performance and speed will be enhanced if your computer’s processor, memory, and available disk space exceed minimum requirements.

Installing OmniPage Pro

OmniPage Pro 14’s installation program takes you through installation with instructions on every screen.

Before installing OmniPage Pro:

◆ Close all other applications, especially anti-virus programs.

◆ Log into your computer with administrator privileges if you are

installing on Windows NT, 2000, XP or Server 2003.

◆ If you own a previous version of OmniPage Pro, or if you are

upgrading from demonstration software or an OmniPage Special Edition, the installer asks your consent to uninstall that product.

! To i n stal l Omni Pa g e Pro:

1. Insert OmniPage Pro’s CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive. The

installation program should start automatically. If it does not start, locate your CD-ROM drive in Windows Explorer and double-click the

Autorun.exe program at the top-level of the CD-ROM.

Chapter 1

2. Choose a language to use during installation. Accept the End-User

License Agreement and enter the serial number shown on the CD envelope.

3. Choose a complete or a custom installation. A complete installation

installs all RealSpeak

Text-to-Speech language modules (currently

9). In OmniPage Pro 14 Office, up to 7 ASR-1600™ Speech Recognition modules are installed. Custom installation lets you exclude or add modules. To exclude a module, click its down arrow and select ‘This feature will be installed when required’.

4. Follow the instructions on each screen to install the software. All files

needed for scanning are copied automatically during installation.

Sometimes uninstalling and then reinstalling OmniPage Pro will solve a problem. See “Uninstalling the software” on page 118.

You can use the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs facility to add or remove RealSpeak or ASR modules later. You will need your installation CD for this.

Installing OmniPage Pro 13

Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro

All files needed for scanner setup and support are copied automatically during the program’s installation, but no scanner setup occurs at installation time. Before using OmniPage Pro 14 for scanning, your scanner should be installed with its own scanner driver software and tested for correct functionality. Scanner driver software is not included with OmniPage Pro.

Scanner setup is done through the Scanner Setup Wizard. You can start this yourself, as described below. Otherwise, it appears when you first attempt to perform scanning. Proceed as follows:

◆ Choose Start!All Programs!ScanSoft OmniPage Pro 14.0!

Scanner Wizard or click the Setup button in the Scanner panel of the Options

dialog box. or choose Scan in the Get Page drop-down list in the OmniPage

Toolbox and click the Get Page button.

◆ The Scanner Setup Wizard starts. If you have a web connection,

the first panel invites you to update the scanner database supplied with the wizard. Choose Yes or No and click on Next.

14 Installation and setup

◆ Choose ‘Select and test scanner or digital camera’, then click

Next. If you have a single installed scanner, it appears, along with any scanners previously set up with OmniPage Pro. If the

required scanner is not listed, click Add Scanner... .

◆ You see a list of all detected scanner drivers in the checkmarked

categories. This can include network devices. Select one and click OK. To install a second device, you must run the Scanner Wizard again.

◆ The wizard reports whether the chosen scanner model already

has settings in the scanner database. If it does, you do not need to test it. If it does not, you should test it. Click on Next.

◆ If you chose not to test, click Finish. If you chose testing, click

Next to have the scanner connection tested. If the connection is in order, you see a menu of further tests. Choose which testing steps you want to run. The Basic test scan is recommended.

Chapter 1

◆ By default OmniPage Pro uses its own scanning interface, located

in the Scanner panel of the Options dialog box. If you want to use your scanner’s own interface instead, choose Advanced settings and select this. Choose Modify hints only if you are experienced in configuring scanners or have been advised by Technical Support to do so.

◆ Click Next to start the tests. For the Basic scan test, insert a test

page into your scanner. The wizard will scan using your scanner manufacturer’s software. Click on Next. Your scanner’s native user-interface will appear.

◆ Click on Scan to begin the sample scan.

◆ If necessary, click on Missing Image… or Improper

Orientation... and make the appropriate selections.

◆ Once the image appears correctly in the window, click on Next.

◆ Move through the remaining requested tests, following the

instructions on the screen.

◆ When all the requested tests have been completed successfully,

the Scanner Wizard reports and invites you to click on Finish.

◆ You have successfully configured your scanner to work with

OmniPage Pro 14!

To change the scanner settings at a later time, or to setup or remove a scanner, reopen the Scanner Setup Wizard from the Windows Start menu or from the Scanner panel of the Options dialog box.

To test and repair an improperly functioning scanner, open the wizard and select ‘Test the current scanner or digital camera’ in the second panel, then work through the procedure described above, maybe using advice received from Technical Support.

To specify a different default scanner, open the wizard to reach the list of setup scanners. Move the highlight to the desired scanner and be sure to close the wizard with Finish.

To get updated settings for your current scanner, open the wizard, request a fresh database download in the first screen, then choose ‘Use current settings with current device’, click Next and then Finish.

Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro 15

How to start the program

To start OmniPage Pro 14 do one of the following:

◆ Click Start in the Windows taskbar and choose All Programs!

ScanSoft OmniPage Pro 14.0!OmniPage Pro 14.0.

◆ Double-click the OmniPage Pro icon in the program’s

installation folder or on the Windows desktop if placed there.

◆ Double-click an OmniPage Document (OPD) icon or file name;

the clicked document is loaded into the program. See “OmniPage Documents” on page 29.

◆ Right click one or more image file icons or file names for a

shortcut menu. Select Open With... OmniPage Pro application. The images are loaded into the program.

On opening, OmniPage Pro’s title screen is displayed and then its desktop. See “The OmniPage Desktop” on page 22. It provides an introduction to the program’s main working areas.

There are several ways of running the program with a limited interface:

◆ Use the Batch Manager program. Click Start in the Windows

taskbar and choose All Programs!ScanSoft OmniPage Pro

14.0! OmniPage Batch Manager. See page 47.

16 Installation and setup

◆ Click Acquire Text from the File menu of an application

registered with the Direct OCR™ facility. See “How to set up Direct OCR” on page 44.

◆ Right-click on one or more image file icons or file names for a

shortcut menu. Select OmniPage Pro 14 and choose a target format or a workflow from its sub-menu. The files will be processed according to the workflow instructions. See page 96.

◆ Click the OmniPage icon on the taskbar. Choose a workflow to

start the program and run the workflow. In OmniPage Pro 14 Office, voice selection of workflow is possible.

◆ Use OmniPage Pro 14 with ScanSoft’s PaperPort

or Pagis® document management products, to add OCR services. See “How to use OmniPage Pro with PaperPort” on page 46.

Chapter 1

Registering your software

ScanSoft’s online registration runs at the end of installation. Please ensure web access is available. We provide an easy electronic form that can be completed in less than five minutes. When the form is filled, click Submit. If you did not register the software during installation, you will be periodically invited to register later. You can go to www.scansoft.com to register online. Click on Support and from the main support screen choose Register in the left-hand column. For a statement on the use of your registration data, please see ScanSoft’s Privacy Policy.

New features in OmniPage Pro 14

The OmniPage® product family is augmented by OmniPage Pro 14. If you are upgrading, you may not need to consult this guide very much. Here are some main areas of innovation compared to OmniPage Pro 12. Features unique to OmniPage Pro 14 Office have the Office icon:

Feature Description See

Higher accuracy

Improved layout retention

Workflows and instant access

Drag-and-drop recognition

Adjustable recognition speed

Speed zoning

Financial dictionary

Character validation

Bullets and numbering

More portable OPDs

A new recognition and parsing engine, four years in development, delivers even better OCR accuracy.

This engine also delivers superior page layout retention with True Page and Flowing Page formatting levels. Text flows better round irregular pictures.

Save workflows to perform recurring tasks without having to take care of individual settings each time. Run workflows instantly from your taskbar.

Select a zone and drag it into the working area of a target application. Graphics are pasted as image, text is recognized and pasted.

Recognition performance can be optimized for greater speed or greater accuracy. On good quality documents even faster processing gives good results.

Do manual zoning quickly. See auto-detected zones and double-click on any of them to turn them into real zones.

An English financial dictionary is added to the existing legal and medical professional dictionaries, available for several languages.

Validate individual accented letters for recognition, in addition to those enabled by the language choice.

Bulleted and numbered paragraphs can be detected. Bullets and numbering can be inserted, removed and edited in the Text Editor.

Save to OmniPage Document (Extended) to have training files, user dictionaries or zone templates embedded in the OPD.

page 31

page 83

page 93

page 89

page 31

page 59

page 31

page 73

page 29

Registering your software 17

Feature Description See Office

Colored backgrounds

Resolution control

Improved proofing system

Concurrent saving

Audio book publishing

Voice read-back

Batch Manager

Smart Folders

Get better recognition of text printed on color or shaded backgrounds. There is also improved noise removal.

Choose the resolution for saved page images and for images embedded in recognized pages.

The two parts of words hyphenated at line ends are now joined. The image viewer and the verifier display both image parts.

Create multiple converters to save to more than one file type in one step: for example save page images and recognized pages.

Save recognized texts as WAV audio files. Transfer these to CD to have scanned documents read aloud anytime - even on the move.

ScanSoft RealSpeak as the Text-to-Speech solution provides better quality voices in more languages for having text read aloud.

Redesign of the previous Schedule OCR facility gives more control and better overview for unattended processing of pre-defined jobs.

Jobs can take input from watched folders, with better handling of multiple folders. Background processing runs whenever image files are sent to these folders. Recurring jobs are supported.

page 49

page 85

page 65

page 86

page 116

page 76

page 101

page 104

Barcode cover pages

Greater PDF support

Open PDF files in MS Word

Export to Office 2003

Voice control

SharePoint, DMS and FTP

Print to PDF functionality

Start a workflow by placing a barcode cover page in a scanner on top of your document. Cover page image files can start image file workflows.

Generate tagged, signed and encrypted Portable Document Files. Allow reading of tags when PDF files are opened to improve layout retention.

ScanSoft enables PDF files to be converted to Word documents when working in Microsoft Word, without using OmniPage Pro.

Support for Microsoft Word 2003 (Word ML). In OmniPage Pro 14 Office support is added for Microsoft Reader (.LIT) and maintained for the XML and eBook file types.

Start workflows and control proofing corrections by voice commands in a number of languages, using the included ScanSoft ASR-1600 voice recognition modules.

Take image files from Microsoft SharePoint, any ODMA-compliant Document Management System (DMS) or an FTP site and export files to these locations for storage or group use.

Create searchable, editable PDF files from text files, such as Word documents. OmniPage Pro installs a PDF printer driver that becomes available in all your print-capable applications.

page 106

page 88

page 89

page 116

page 107

page 92

page 88

A more complete list of features and differences appears in online Help.

18 Installation and setup

Chapter 2

Introduction

You probably use your computer for business correspondence, preparing reports, handling data and an ever-increasing number of other uses. The challenge is that, in spite of the digital revolution, certain sources of information still circulate in printed, paper form and cannot be used immediately in a computer.

For example, if you want to incorporate information from a magazine article in a report you are preparing, you somehow have to get the text from the article into your computer. Painstakingly retyping the article is not an appealing solution.

This chapter introduces you to the solution: optical character recognition (OCR). It describes how OmniPage Pro 14 uses OCR technology to transform text from scanned pages or image files into editable text for use in your favorite computer applications.

We present the following topics:

◆ What is optical character recognition

• Documents in OmniPage Pro

• Basic processing steps

◆ The OmniPage Desktop

◆ Managing documents

◆ OmniPage Documents

◆ Settings

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 19

What is optical character recognition

Optical character recognition is the process of extracting text from an image. This image can result from scanning a paper document or opening an electronic image file. Images do not have editable text characters; they have many tiny dots (pixels) that together form character shapes. These present a picture of the text on a page.

During OCR, OmniPage Pro analyzes the character shapes in an image and defines solutions to produce editable text. After OCR, you can save the resulting text to a variety of word-processing, desktop publishing or spreadsheet applications.

OmniPage Pro’s OCR capabilities

In addition to text recognition, OmniPage Pro can retain the following elements of a document through the OCR process.

Graphics

Photos, logos, and drawings are examples of graphics.

Tex t form a ttin g

Font types, sizes and styles (such as bold, italic and underlines examples of character formatting. Indents, tabs, margins and line spacing are examples of paragraph formatting.

) are

20 Introduction

Page formatting

Column structure, table formats, and placement of graphics and headings are examples of page formatting.

The graphics, text and page formatting elements that OmniPage Pro retains are determined by the settings you select. Refer to the Settings Guidelines in the online Help for more information about selecting settings.

OmniPage Pro only recognizes machine-generated characters such as offset or laserprinted or typewritten text. However, it can retain handwritten text, such as a signature, as a graphic.

Chapter 2

Documents in OmniPage Pro

OmniPage Pro 14 handles documents one at a time. When you acquire your first image (from scanner or from file) a new document is started. Further acquired images are added to the same document, until you save and close it.

A document in OmniPage Pro consists of one image for each document page. After you perform OCR, the document will also contain recognized text, displayed in the Text Editor, possibly along with graphics and tables. See “The OmniPage Desktop” on page 22.

Basic processing steps

There are three ways of handling documents: with automatic, manual or workflow processing. See “Automatic processing” on page 38, “Manual processing” on page 40 and “Workflows” on page 94. The basic steps for all processing methods are broadly the same:

1. Bring a set of images into OmniPage Pro.

You can scan a paper document with or without an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) or load one or more image files. The resulting images can appear as thumbnails in the Image Panel along with the image of the first page entered. The document pages are summarized in the Document Manager. See “Defining the source of page images” on page 48.

2. Perform OCR to generate editable text.

During OCR, OmniPage Pro creates zones around elements on the page that will be processed, and then interprets text characters or graphics in each zone. Manual and template zoning are also possible. After OCR, you can check and correct errors in the document using the OCR Proofreader and edit the document in the Text Editor.

3. Export the document to the desired location.

You can save your document to a specified file name and type, place it on the Clipboard, send it as a mail attachment or publish it. You can save it as an OmniPage Document (OPD) as described later. You can save the same document repeatedly to different destinations, different file types, with different settings and levels of formatting. See “Saving and exporting” on page 79.

What is optical character recognition 21

Standard toolbar

The OmniPage Desktop

The OmniPage Desktop has a title bar and a menu bar along the top and a status bar along the bottom. It has three main working areas, separated by splitters: the Document Manager, the Image Panel and the Text Editor. Each has close, maximize and restore buttons top right. The Image Panel has an Image toolbar and the Text Editor has a Formatting toolbar.

OmniPage Toolbox

Thumbnails show a picture of each page in the document.

The current page has an “eye” icon.

This page has been recognized.

Image toolbar

Page navigation buttons

Buttons to show or hide the Document Manager, Text Editor and the Image Panel’s thumbnails and current page display. This can also be done from the View menu.

Drag these splitters to resize the working areas.

Image Panel:

This is displaying the image of the current page, together with its zones. The image panel can display the current page, thumbnails, or both.

Formatting toolbar

The Text Editor view buttons offer three formatting levels.

Text Editor:

This is displaying the recognition results from the current page in True Page view.

22 Introduction

Chapter 2

We show the program with a three-page document. Page one is the current page, which has been recognized and proofed. Page two has been recognized but not proofed yet. Page three has been acquired and manually zoned, but not recognized yet. The icons at the bottom of the thumbnail images show page status.

Status bar buttons let you show or hide the main screen areas and move to other pages in the document. A right mouse click in any screen area brings up a shortcut menu with the most useful commands for that area.

The Menu bar

For concise information on any menu item, click the context-sensitive help button and then click a menu item. A popup text explains the purpose of the menu item. Click anywhere to close the popup.

The Toolbars

The program has three main toolbars; all can be floated. Use the View menu to show, hide or customize them. Context-sensitive help explains the purpose of all tools. Two further toolbars govern specific tasks.

Toolbar

Standard

Image

Formatting

Verifi er

Reorder

Default location

Horizontal under Menu bar

Vertically to left of current page image

Horizontal at top of Text E d i tor

Hover the cursor over the verifier window to see this floating toolbar.

Click the Change reading order tool. This toolbar replaces the Formatting toolbar.

Other docking locations

Any edge of the OmniPage Desktop

Vertically to right of current page image

None

Purpose

Performing basic program functions. See page 29 and page 65.

Image, zoning and table operations. See page 53 and page 59.

Formatting recognized text in the Text Editor. See page 73.

Controlling the location and appearance of the verifier. See page 67.

Modifying the order of elements in recognized pages. See page 73.

The OmniPage Desktop 23

The Image Panel

When this displays the current page image, the Image toolbar is available. All page images have a background value: process or ignore. Zones can be manually drawn on page images, or can be placed automatically after recognition. There are five zone types: Process, Ignore, Text, Table, Graphics. Areas inside process zones and on a process background outside other zones have zones automatically drawn and their zone types determined during processing. See “Zones and backgrounds” on page 53.

If the current page image is hidden, the thumbnails appear in rows to make the best use of the available space.

24 Introduction

The Text Editor

This displays recognition results in any of three formatting levels:

No Formatting view (NF)

Retain Fonts and Paragraphs view (RFP) True Page (TP)

The True Page

formatting level retains page layout using text, table and

picture boxes, and frames. It can display multicolumn areas, to show text blocks that can be treated as flowing columns at export time. Tru e Page is also an export formatting level, along with Flowing Page that retains page layout without boxes and frames. See page 64.

In both the Image Panel and Text Editor, the shortcut menu (right mouse click) allows you to zoom in our out on the display. The standard toolbar also provides a zoom control.

Chapter 2

The OmniPage Toolbox

This Toolbox lets you drive the processing. By default it is located along the top of the OmniPage Desktop, just above the working areas. It can be floated and also be docked along the bottom of the desktop.

Start/Stop button Get Page button

Workflow dropdown list with two sample workflows and a user-defined one.

Automatic processing is started, and can be stopped and re-started with the Start button when “1-2-3” is selected in the Workflow drop-down list. See “Automatic processing” on page 38.

Manual processing allows you to process documents page-by-page and step-by-step. Start each step (again with “1-2-3” selected) with the three large buttons: the Get Page button (1), the Perform OCR button (2) and the Export Results button (3). See “Manual processing” on page 40.

You can switch between automatic and manual processing any time the program is not busy with processing. That means you can switch between them while you are working within a document. You can automatically process some pages, then add more pages with manual processing. After processing a stack of pages automatically, you can inspect the results and then go back to reprocess certain pages manually. This procedure is described in chapter 3. See “Combined processing” on page 41.

Get Pages drop-down list

Perform OCR button Export Results button

Layout Description drop-down list

Export Results drop-down list

Workflow pro c e s s ing is designed for performing repeated tasks efficiently. Select New Workflow... in the Workflow drop-down list and click Start. The Workflow Assistant helps you define a workflow that can be saved for repeated use. See “Workflow Assistant” on page 98.

The OmniPage Desktop 25

Managing documents

Document management can be done by thumbnails in the Image Panel or by the Document Manager, situated along the bottom of the OmniPage Desktop. Both summarize the pages in the document and are synchronized. Our pictures show these with the same seven-page document. Pages 1 and 2 are selected and page 4 is the current page, that is, the one shown in the Image Panel. Page status is shown as follows:

Page Status Icon Page image has been...

1 Acquired acquired but has not yet been recognized.

2 Recognized

4 Modified

6 Pending

7 Saved recognized and saved at least once.

Recognized, Proofed

Modified, proofed

recognized, but not proofread, or proofing was interrupted on the page.

recognized, and proofing has reached the end of the page.

recognized with at least one editing or formatting change made in the Text Editor.

recognized, edited in the Text Editor, and proofing has reached the end of the page.

acquired, maybe recognized; some zone changes are stored but not yet processed.

Thumbnails

These present a set of numbered thumbnail images, one for each page in the document. Scroll to see pages as necessary. The current page has an ‘eye’ icon. You can select multiple pages in the document; these have a distinctive appearance. Use thumbnails for page operations, as follows:

Jump to a page: Click the thumbnail of the desired page.

Reorder a page: Click the thumbnail of the page you want to move and

drag it above the desired page number. Pages are renumbered automatically.

26 Introduction

Delete a page: Select the thumbnail of the page you want to delete and press the Delete key.

Select multiple pages: Hold down the Shift key and click two thumbnails to select all pages between and including them. Hold down

Chapter 2

the Ctrl key as you click thumbnails to add pages to a selection one by one. Then you can move or delete the selected pages as a group, or send them to (re)recognition. You can also export selected pages.

Get information on an image by hovering the cursor over it with Image Info enabled in the image panel shortcut menu. A popup text displays the image size in pixels and the program’s unit of measurement. Image resolution is also shown.

Document Manager

This provides an overview of your document with a table. Each row represents one page. Columns present statistical or status information for each page, and (where appropriate) document totals. The picture shows columns that a user has specified.

Enter comments or searchable keywords here.

Move the cursor onto the page’s status icon to see a thumbnail of the page.

The current page is shown with an ‘eye’ icon. You can use the Document Manager for page operations, as follows:

Jump to a page: Click the leftmost part of the page row or double click anywhere in its row.

Reorder a page: Click the row of the page you want to move and drag it to the desired location. An indicator on the left shows where the page will be inserted. Pages are renumbered automatically.

Delete a page: Select the row of the page you want to delete and press the Delete key.

Select multiple pages: Hold down the Shift key and click two page rows to select all pages between and including them. Hold down the Ctrl key as you click rows to add pages to a selection one by one. Then you can move or delete the selected pages as a group, or send them to (re)recognition. You can also export selected pages.

Managing documents 27

When multiple pages are being selected, the page set as current does not change. All selected pages are highlighted.

Customizing Document Manager columns

You can specify which columns of information you want to see in the Document Manager. Click Customize Columns... in the View menu for the following dialog box:

This item is highlighted.

Click a checkbox to select the item.

Image sizes are expressed in pixels.

Define a width for the highlighted item.

Highlight an item and use these arrows to change the order of columns.

Define which columns should appear, their widths, and column order. The topic Customizing Document Manager columns in online Help clarifies what is presented in each column. You can change column widths easily in the Document Manager; just drag the column dividers in the title bar.

Deleting pages from a document

Page deletions must be confirmed and can be undone. Delete the current page only with the item Delete Current Page in the Edit menu. Delete all selected pages in the Document Manager or from the thumbnails by pressing the Delete key or using the shortcut menu command Clear.

28 Introduction

Chapter 2

Printing a document

You can print the document with the Print item in the File menu. Choose whether to print images or text (that is, recognition results as they appear in the Text Editor). You can print all pages or a range of pages. The Print tool in the Standard toolbar prints images or text, depending whether the Image Panel or the Text Editor is active.

Closing a document

Choose Close in the File menu to close a document. You are prompted to save your document if you have not saved it or you have modified it since the last save. See the next section on saving the document as an OmniPage Document (*.opd). You will also be prompted to save unsaved training data if you selected ‘Prompt to save training data when closing document’ in the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box.

OmniPage Documents

The OmniPage Document is the program’s proprietary file type; it has the extension .opd. You save the document to the OPD file type if you want to work with it again in OmniPage Pro during a future session. You can then process unfinished pages, add more pages and proof or edit recognition results.

An OmniPage Document contains the original page images (deskewed and pre-processed) with any zones placed on them. After recognition, the OPD also contains the recognition results. Recognized characters are stored along with their coordinate and confidence data. This preserves the links between image and text, so that verification and proofing remain available when the OPD is reopened in future sessions.

When you save an OmniPage Document, the current settings (and unsaved training) are also saved. When you open an OmniPage Document, its settings are applied, replacing those existing in the program.

OmniPage Documents 29

Why save to OPD

You do not have to save your documents to the OPD file type. You would typically do this for the following reasons:

◆ You cannot finish working with the document in the current

session.

◆ You want to pass the document to other users who have

OmniPage Pro. For example, you can pass an OPD file to a specialist for proofing. In an office network, you may have one scanner generating images for recognition and proofing at several workstations.

◆ You want to build up an archive of recognized documents whose

original images remain accessible. The recognized texts allow searching by keywords and other document retrieval techniques.

Recognition results should be saved from OPD files before installing any OmniPage Pro upgrade. These files may not be upwards compatible to newer OPD file formats, or possibly only the images will be retained when the files are upgraded. When you open an OPD created by OmniPage Pro 10, only images are loaded. When you open an OPD created by OmniPage Pro 11, images and recognized pages are loaded, but no zones are retained. All three are retained in OPD files originating from OmniPage Pro 12.

30 Introduction

How to save to OPD

Saving to OPD is done from the File menu, or by using the Save button in the Standard toolbar. The title bar shows the OmniPage Document file name. If you intend to create an OPD, you can save it to this file type at an early stage, for protection. Then use the Save button to save it periodically as you work. Save it again at the end of your session.

When you close the document or exit the program, you will be prompted to save the document as an OPD. You can include one or more saves to the OPD file type in a workflow, along with steps to save images or recognition results to other file types, see “Creating workflows” on page 98.

Chapter 2

When saving, you have two file type choices: OmniPage Document or OmniPage Document (Extended). The latter allows you to embed a user dictionary, training file or zone template file in the OPD. This can increase file size considerably but makes the OPD more portable. To embed any of these items, load them before the save to the OmniPage Document (Extended) file type.

How to load an OPD

Select Open OPD... from the File menu. The file type OmniPage Document includes both normal and extended OPDs. Choose the required file. An embedded user dictionary, training file or zone template can be resaved to a named file. Opening an OmniPage Document is also available as a workflow step.

Settings

The Options dialog box is the central location for OmniPage Pro settings. Access it from the Standard toolbar or the Tools menu. Contextsensitive help provides information on each setting. In overview, the settings panels are:

OCR

Use this to specify recognition languages, additional characters and a user or professional dictionary. Click the checkbox before a language to select or deselect it. Multiple selection is possible; select only languages appearing in the document to be recognized. The top items are the recently selected languages. Key in the first letters of a language to jump to it. You can also choose to optimize processing for speed or accuracy, define a reject character, handle font matching and provide a custom layout description. See page 51.

Scanner

Use this to define page size and orientation for scanning. You can also make brightness and contrast settings and define options for scanning multi-page documents, with or without an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). You can change scanner setup settings or install a new scanner or change the default scanner. See “Input from scanner” on page 49. This

Settings 31

panel is not available if you requested display of your scanner’s native TWAIN interface when you set up your scanner. See “Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro” on page 14.

Direct OCR

This feature provides OCR services directly from your favorite word processor or similar application. Use this panel to register and unregister applications for Direct OCR and to enable or disable this service. You can also specify automatic or manual zoning and whether proofreading is desired or not. See “How to set up Direct OCR” on page 44.

Process

Use this to define where new images should be placed in the document, to request prompting for more pages when scanning, to specify two-page scanning for handling books, and other settings.

Proofing

Use this to define whether proofreading should begin automatically after recognition. Define also whether IntelliTrain should run, and use it to load or work with a training file. See “Proofreading OCR results” on page 65.

General

Change the interface language here. Enable an OmniPage icon on your taskbar that will list your workflows for quick start processing. Enable automatic detection of online updates and other settings.

32 Introduction

Tex t Edit o r

Use this to show or hide some features in the Text Editor, to define the unit of measurement to be used and to turn word wrapping on or off. See “Text and image editing” on page 73.

Some settings have an effect only on future recognition. Examples are the recognition languages, a training file or scanner brightness. These settings should be correctly adjusted before you start processing. To have changes in these settings applied to already recognized pages, you will have to re-recognize them. Other settings are implemented immediately in all existing pages. Examples are Text Editor settings like word wrap or measurement units.

Chapter 3

Processing documents

This tutorial chapter describes different ways you can process a document and also provides information on key parts of this processing.

◆ Quick Start Guide

◆ Processing overview

◆ Automatic processing

◆ Manual processing

◆ Combined processing

◆ Processing with workflows

◆ Processing from other applications (Direct OCR, PaperPort)

◆ Processing with the Batch Manager

The detailed topics are:

◆ Defining the source of page images

◆ Describing the layout of the document

◆ Zones and backgrounds

• Automatic zoning

• Manual zoning

• Zone types and properties

• Working with zones

• Speed zoning

◆ Table grids in the image

◆ Using zone templates

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 33

Quick Start Guide

This topic takes you step-by-step through the basic OCR process.

Loading and recognizing sample image files

You will find sample image files in the program folder, both single-page and multi-page files. First try reading these files using the procedure presented below, except for the references to a scanner. See “Input from image files” on page 48. The results provide you with a benchmark of the recognition quality you should expect from your own files of comparable quality.

Next, try scanning a page from your scanner.

34 Processing documents

Scanning and recognizing a single page

Turn your scanner on and be sure it is working correctly. Choose a page with good-quality clear text for this test.

We assume OmniPage Pro’s default settings are set and that your document is in the language you specified for interface language during installation. Open the Options dialog box from the Tools menu and choose Use Defaults if you are not using the program for the first time.

You will process the document automatically and save the recognition results to a file. You will proof the document but will not edit it inside the Tex t Edit o r.

What you do: What happens:

Chapter 3

1. Set up your scanner using the Scanner Wizard, if this is not already done.

2. Select Start!All Programs!ScanSoft OmniPage Pro 14.0!OmniPage Pro 14.0

3. Place the document correctly in your scanner.

4. From the Get Page drop-down list, select a scan option for your document: black-and-white, grayscale or color.

5. From the Layout Description drop-down list, check Automatic is selected. For a wide range of documents, this is the best choice.

6. From the Export Results drop-down list, check that Save to File is selected.

7. Make sure 1-2-3 is selected in the Workflow

drop-down list. Click the Start button.

8. Use the OCR Proofreader to modify words

that the program suspects have not been recognized correctly.

9. Click in the Text Editor. Select Text Editor views one after another, to see how the page appears in each view.

10. Click Resume to restart proofing. When the message OCR Proofreading is complete appears, click on OK.

11. Choose a file name, file type, path and a

formatting level to save your recognized document. Click on OK.

12. Inspect the document in your word process-

ing program.

Configures OmniPage Pro to work with your scanner.

Opens OmniPage Pro on your computer.

Allows you to determine how pictures or colored texts and backgrounds will look in the exported document. Color scanning needs a color scanner.

Configures the program how to place zones on the page and decide their properties automatically.

This means you will be able to name your export file after you have proofed the document.

OmniPage Pro will start to scan in your document. A thumbnail appears with a progress indicator. The OCR Proofreader appears.

The OCR Proofreader operates like a spell checker in a word processing program, but with added OCR-specific features. It removes markings from words you proof.

Each Text Editor view defines a formatting level. This guides you which level to choose at saving time.

This ends the OCR Proofreader process. The Save to File dialog box will appear.

By default, Save and Launch is enabled, so your document will be automatically opened in the word processing program associated with the file type that you selected.

You have successfully used OmniPage Pro 14 to recognize your document and open it in your target application!

If you succeeded in getting good results from the sample image files, but not from the scanned page, check your scanner installation and settings: in particular brightness and image resolution. See “Input from scanner” on page 49. This provides a model of optimum brightness. See also the online Help topics Setting up your scanner and Scanner troubleshooting.

Quick Start Guide 35

Processing overview

The following flow diagram summarizes the processing steps:

Get Pages

from file

page 48

from scanner page 49

other page 48

Describe

page

layout

page 51

Apply a

template

page 61

Auto-

zoning

page 53

Manual

zoning

page 54

Perform

OCR

with current settings

page 31

Verify and

edit

page 67

Proofread

page 65

Export pages

to file

page 82

to Clipboard

page 89

via Mail

page 90

other

page 92

Here is an overview of the processing methods you can use. You will find step-by-step guidance for each of them in the following pages.

Automatic

A fast and easy way to process documents is to let OmniPage Pro do it automatically for you. Select settings in the Options dialog box and in the OmniPage Toolbox drop-down lists and then click Start. It will take each page through the whole process from beginning to end, when possible running in parallel. It will typically auto-zone the pages.

36 Processing documents

Manual

Manual processing gives you more precise control over the way your pages are handled. You can process the document page-by-page with different settings for each page. The program also stops between each step: acquiring images, performing recognition, exporting. This lets you, for instance, draw zones manually or change recognition language(s). You start each step by clicking the three buttons on the OmniPage Toolbox.

Combined

You can process a document automatically and view results in the Text Editor. If most pages are in order, but a few have not turned out as expected, you can switch to manual processing to adjust settings and re-

Chapter 3

recognize just those problem pages. Alternatively, you can acquire images with manual processing, draw zones on some or all of them, and then send all pages to automatic processing.

Workflow

A workflow consists of a series of steps and their settings. Typically it will include a recognition step, but it does not have to. Workflows are listed in the Workflow drop-down list – sample workflows plus any you create. You can choose to place an OmniPage icon on your taskbar. Its shortcut menu lists your workflows. Click a workflow to launch OmniPage Pro and have it run.

Let the Workflow Assistant guide you in creating new workflows. It provides a choice of steps and the settings they need. After each step icon is selected and its settings (if any) defined, you get a new set of step icons to choose from. When ready, you can save the workflow for future use, but this is not compulsory. You can use the Assistant just to get more guidance when doing automatic processing. See “Workflow Assistant” on page 98.

In other applications

You can use the Direct OCR feature to call on the recognition services of OmniPage Pro while working in your usual word-processor or similar application. OmniPage Pro also automatically links itself to ScanSoft’s PaperPort and Pagis document management programs.

At a later time

You can schedule OCR jobs or other processing jobs to be performed automatically at a later time, when you may not even be present at your computer. This is done through the Batch Manager. When you choose New Job, the Workflow Assistant appears, with a slightly modified set of choices and settings. The main difference is its closing panel that allows you to specify a starting time, a recurring job or watched folder instructions.

A Batch Manager job is basically a workflow with timing instructions added. See “Batch Manager” on page 101.

Processing overview 37

Automatic processing

Automatic processing provides an efficient way of handling documents, especially larger ones. First you select all settings needed, then you can use the Start button in the OmniPage Toolbox to process a new document from start to finish or to restart and finish processing on an open document.

Start button

Workf lo w drop-down list

Get Page button Perform OCR button Export Results button

Export Results drop-down list

Get Pages drop-down list

Some items appear

only in OmniPage Pro 14 Office, others only if the source is available.

Layout Description drop-down list

1. Make sure 1-2-3 is selected in the Workflow drop-down list.

2. Select the desired Get Page setting in the drop-down list. You define

the document source, which can be from image files or from a scanner. See “Defining the source of page images” on page 48.

38 Processing documents

3. Select a setting from the Layout Description drop-down list, as

shown above. This guides the program in auto-zoning the pages. You describe the incoming pages or specify a zone template file. See “Describing the layout of the document” on page 51.

4. Select a setting from the Export Results drop-down list. You can save

pages (current, selected, all) to file, copy them to Clipboard, send

Chapter 3

them as mail attachments or direct them to other targets.

Save the document as an OmniPage Document file from the File menu or Standard toolbar.

See “Saving and exporting” on page 79.

5. Choose in the Standard toolbar or Options in the Tools menu

and check that settings are appropriate for your document. You can, for instance, specify recognition languages and whether you want to proofread the document or not. See “Settings” on page 31.

6. Click the Start button or choose Workflows in the Process menu and

click Start with 1-2-3 still selected. Each page of the document is processed and finished one after the other. The program may perform tasks simultaneously, for instance it may start loading and recognizing a new page as you proofread the previous page.

Stopping and restarting automatic processing

Stop: When automatic processing is in progress, the Start button becomes Stop. Click it to interrupt automatic processing. You may do this if you find that some settings need to be changed.

Restart: When automatic processing is stopped, the Start button is restored. Click it to restart processing. The Automatic Processing dialog box lets you specify what you want to do:

◆ Finish processing unrecognized and unproofed pages and then

export the results.

◆ Add more pages from the same source or a different source,

with changed or unchanged settings.

◆ Re-process all pages to discard all recognition results and re-

recognize all pages in the document with different settings. You can specify auto-zoning or a template file. You may want to do this if an unsuitable setting caused poor results on all pages. An example is incorrect language choice, resulting in almost all words marked suspect during proofing. This option lets you perform re-recognition without having to scan or load or rezone all the images again.

Automatic processing 39

Manual processing

Manual processing gives you more precise control over the way your pages are handled. You can process the document page-by-page with different settings for each page. The program also stops between each step: acquiring images, performing recognition, exporting. This lets you, for instance, change the page background and draw zones manually on each page. You start each step in the process by clicking the three numbered buttons on the OmniPage Toolbox.

1. Select 1-2-3 in the Workflow drop-down list. Click in the

Standard toolbar or Options in the Tools menu to check or make settings in the Options dialog box. See “Settings” on page 31.

2. Select the desired value for the Get Page button from the drop-down

list. You define the document source, which can be from image files or from a scanner. When scanning with the OmniPage interface, select a scanning mode and use the Scanner and Process panels of the Options dialog box to select settings. See “Defining the source of page images” on page 48.

40 Processing documents

3. Click the Get Page button. This either brings up a dialog box

allowing you to name images files, or initiates scanning. Thumbnail images of each page can appear in the Image Panel, along with the current page image. Use status bar buttons to show or hide either of these. Acquired pages are summarized in the Document Manager.

All page images enter the program with a process background. Provided you draw no zones on these pages, they will be auto-zoned when recognition is requested.

You can manually draw and modify zones on one or more images and assign zone properties. Status bar buttons let you move to other pages. As soon as you draw a zone on a page, it takes on an ignore background. You can specify auto-zoning on parts of a page by drawing process zones. See “Zones and backgrounds” on page 53.

Chapter 3

6. Select a value for the Perform OCR button. You describe the layout

of the incoming pages. This value has an influence if auto-zoning runs on any pages. See “Describing the layout of the document” on page 51. You can also select a template to have its zones placed on the current page. See “Using zone templates” on page 61.

7. Click the Perform OCR button to have the current page recognized.

To have selected pages recognized, make a multiple selection with the thumbnails or in the Document Manager (See “Managing documents” on page 26) and then click the Perform OCR button. Recognized pages appear in the Text Editor.

8. If you requested proofing, the OCR Proofreader dialog box displays

suspect words one after the other from the recognized page(s). You can proof and edit the recognized text. See “Proofreading OCR results” on page 65.

9. Continue loading pages, performing OCR, editing, proofing and

verifying as desired. You can change the reading order of page elements in the Text Editor. See “Text and image editing” on page 73.

10.

Select a value for the Export Results button. You can save pages (current, selected or all) to file, copy them to Clipboard, send them as mail attachments or send them to other targets. Some targets are available only in OmniPage Pro 14 Office; others appear only if the target is detected on your system. Click the Export Results button. See “Saving and exporting” on page 79. Save the document as an OmniPage Document file from the File menu or Standard toolbar.

Combined processing

Automatic processing provides speed and efficiency. Manual processing demands more attention, but gives greater control over results. It is possible to tap into both benefits while processing a single document.

Combined processing 41

Start automatically and finish manually:

When you have a large document with only a few pages needing special attention, you do not have to manually process the whole document. You can process it automatically and view results in the Text Editor. You can determine which pages are in order, and which need different settings or some manual zoning. After adjusting settings and/or modifying zones, use manual processing to re-recognize just those pages.

1. Prepare the document and perform automatic processing, as already

described.

2. If you close or finish proofing you will be invited to save the

document. This is recommended, even if it is not in its final form.

3. Select a page needing rezoning and delete or modify the existing

zones in the Image Panel. You can also load a template to let its zones replace existing ones. Draw new zones as desired. See “Zones and backgrounds” on page 53.

4. Change other settings as required for the current page. See “Settings”

on page 31.

5. Click the Perform OCR button to re-recognize the current page.

Confirm that the previous recognition results should be overwritten. Alternatively, you can use on-the-fly processing to handle zoning changes without re-recognizing the whole page. See “On-the-fly editing” on page 75.

42 Processing documents

6. To re-recognize more than one page, select the required pages in the

thumbnails or Document Manager before clicking the Perform OCR button.

7. When all pages have been re-recognized with acceptable results, save

the document again.

Start manually and finish automatically:

1. Prepare settings and acquire images for the document by clicking the

Get Page button.

2. Examine the pages for suitable brightness, orientation and content.

Rescan or rotate unsuitable images. Reorder pages as desired.

3. Manually zone pages where you want to process only part of the page

or if you want to give precise zoning instructions. Use ignore

Chapter 3

backgrounds or zones to exclude areas from processing. Use process backgrounds or zones to specify areas to be auto-zoned.

4. Click the Start button, then choose Finish Processing Existing Pages in

the Automatic Processing dialog box.

5. After proofing (if requested) you can save or export the document.

Processing with workflows

A workflow consists of a series of steps and their settings. It does not have to conform to the 1-2-3 pattern of traditional processing. Workflows allow you to handle recurring tasks more efficiently, because all the steps and their settings are pre-defined.

To run a workflow with OmniPage Pro closed

Click on the OmniPage icon in your taskbar. Select a workflow from its shortcut menu. OmniPage Pro will start and immediately run the workflow. If you do not see the icon, enable it in the General panel of the Options dialog box.

To run a workflow with OmniPage Pro open

You can use the taskbar icon as described above, or you can select the workflow in the Workflow drop-down list and click Start. When a workflow is running, program settings are not accessible.

To modify a workflow

Select the workflow in the Workflow drop-down list and press the Workflow Assistant button on the Standard toolbar, or choose Workflows... in the Tools menu, select the workflow and click Modify.

To make a new workflow

There are sample workflows supplied with the program. You can modify these, or use them as the source for new workflows. New workflows are made with the Workflow Assistant. See page 98 in Chapter 6.

Processing with workflows 43

Processing from other applications

You can use the Direct OCR™ feature to call on the recognition services of OmniPage Pro while you work in your usual word-processor or other application. First you must establish the direct connection with the application. Then, two items in its File Menu open the door to OCR facilities.

How to set up Direct OCR

1. Start the application you want connected to OmniPage Pro. Start

OmniPage Pro, open the Options dialog box at the Direct OCR panel and select Enable Direct OCR.

2. Select process options for proofing and zoning. These function for

future Direct OCR work until you change them again; they are not applied when OmniPage Pro is used on its own.

3. The Unregistered panel displays running or previously registered

applications. Select the desired one(s) and click Add. You can browse for an unlisted application.

This must be selected for Direct OCR to function.

Use these to specify interactive steps: manual zoning or proofing.

These applications are set to support Direct OCR.

44 Processing documents

Chapter 3

How to use Direct OCR

1. Open your registered application and work in a document. To

acquire recognition results from scanned pages, place them correctly in the scanner.

2. Use the target application’s File Menu item Acquire Text Settings... to

specify settings to be used during recognition. Any settings not offered take their values from those last used in OmniPage Pro. Settings changed for Direct OCR are also changed in OmniPage Pro.

3. Use the File Menu item Acquire Text to acquire images from scanner

or file.

4. If you selected Draw zones automatically in the Direct OCR panel of

the Options dialog box, or under Acquire Text Settings..., recognition proceeds immediately.

5. If Draw zones automatically is not selected, each page image will be

presented to you, allowing you to draw zones manually. Click the Perform OCR button to continue with recognition.

6. If proofing was specified, this follows recognition. Then the

recognized text is placed at the cursor position in your application,

with the formatting level specified by Acquire Text Settings... .

If OmniPage Pro is running when Direct OCR is called from a target application, a second instance of OmniPage Pro is launched.

See the Direct OCR topics in online Help for more information. These include a topic Direct OCR Questions and Answers. The Readme file and the ScanSoft web site may present more recent information relating to specific target applications.

Processing from other applications 45

How to use OmniPage Pro with PaperPort

The PaperPort® program is a paper management software product from ScanSoft. It lets you link pages with suitable applications. Pages can contain pictures, text or both. If PaperPort exists on a computer with OmniPage Pro, its OCR services become available and amplify the power of PaperPort. You can choose an OCR program by right clicking on a text application’s PaperPort link, selecting Preferences and then selecting OmniPage Pro 14 as the OCR package. OCR settings can be specified, as with Direct OCR.

46 Processing documents

Here OmniPage Pro 14 has been selected as the OCR package for MS Word 2000. Then you can drag page images from the PaperPort desktop onto the MS Word link on a PaperPort toolbar. While the text is being recognized, only a progress monitor is displayed. OmniPage Pro’s manual zoning window or proofing facility will appear if requested. The recognition results are placed in a new unnamed document in the target application.

Chapter 3

Processing with the Batch Manager

You can schedule processing jobs to be performed automatically at a specified time in the future. The job pages can come from a scanner with an ADF or from image files. You do not have to be present at your computer at job start time, nor does OmniPage Pro have to be running. It does not matter if your computer is turned off after the job is set up, so long as it is running at job start time. If you are scanning pages, your scanner must be functioning at job start time, with the pages loaded in the ADF. Here is how to set up your first job:

1. Click Batch Manager... in the Process menu or in the Windows Start

menu: select All Programs!ScanSoft OmniPage Pro

14.0!OmniPage Batch Manager. The Batch Manager window appears. Because there are no existing jobs, the Workflow Assistant appears immediately.

2. Define a starting point for the new job. This can be a fresh start, an

existing workflow or (later on) an existing job. Click Next to finish each step.

3. The following panels allow you to build the workflow for the job, as

described in Chapter 6.

4. The final panel lets you name the job and specify timing instructions.

In OmniPage Pro 14 Office you can request e-mail notification of job completion, create recurring jobs and specify a stopping time for watched folder jobs.

Click Finish to confirm job creation.

The Batch Manager window lists all jobs, with status Not Scheduled, Waiting, Running, Watching, Paused or Completed. Use Modify... in the Edit menu to change settings for jobs with status Not Scheduled or Completed. You can view, modify and reuse completed jobs to process new jobs needing similar settings. You can delete completed jobs when they are no longer needed.

For more information, please see Batch Manager in the online Help and “Batch Manager” on page 101.

Processing with the Batch Manager 47

Defining the source of page images

There are two possible image sources: from image files and from a scanner. There are two main types of scanners: flatbed or sheetfed. A scanner may have a built-in or added Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), which makes it easier to scan multi-page documents. The images from scanned documents can be input directly into OmniPage Pro or may be saved with the scanner’s own software to an image file, which OmniPage Pro can later open.

Input from image files

You can create image files from your own scanner, or receive them by e-mail or as fax files. OmniPage Pro can open a wide range of image file types. See “File types for opening and saving images” on page 115. Select Load Image File in the Get Pages drop-down list. Files are specified in the Load Image File dialog box. This appears when you start automatic processing. In manual processing, click the Get Page button or use the Process menu. The lower part of the dialog box provides advanced settings, and can be shown or hidden. Here, it is displayed.

This is the current folder.

Use Shift+ clicks or Ctrl+clicks to place more than one file in the File name text box.

Specify the file type(s) you want listed.

This can be used for multipage TIFF, DCX, MAX and PDF files.

This is a blank image file for the saving option: "New file for each blank page".

48 Processing documents

Select this to see a thumbnail of the selected file. Not available when multiple files are selected.

Click Advanced to open the lower panel and Basic to close it.

Use this to add files from different folders and to control file order precisely.

Use these arrows to change the file order.

Chapter 3

Normally the Add button places each file at the bottom of the file list. To place a file at a different location, highlight a file in the list. The new file will be added immediately below the lowest highlighted file.

In OmniPage Pro Office, files can also be imported from FTP locations, Microsoft SharePoint or ODMA sources.

The minimum width or height for an image file is 50 pixels; the maximum is 71cm. (28 inches). See online Help for pixel limits.

Input from scanner

You must have a functioning, supported scanner correctly installed with OmniPage Pro. See “Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro” on page 14. You have a choice of scanning modes. In making your choice, there are two main considerations:

◆ Which type of output do you want in your export document?

◆ Which mode will yield best OCR accuracy?

Scan black and white

Select this to scan in black-and-white. This is not suitable if you want color in your output document, nor if you want pictures to look like so-called ‘black-and-white’ photographs: they need grayscale scanning. For best OCR accuracy, use this for crisp black texts on a white or light background. Black-and-white images can be scanned and handled quicker than others and occupy less disk space.

Scan grayscale

Select this to use grayscale scanning. Choose this to keep ‘black-andwhite’ photographs in the output document. For best OCR accuracy, use this for pages with varying or low contrast (not much difference between light and dark) and with text on colored or shaded backgrounds.

Scan color

Select this to scan in color. This will function only with color scanners. Choose this if you want colored graphics, texts or backgrounds in the output document. For OCR accuracy, it offers no more benefit than grayscale scanning (for a given resolution), but will require much more time, memory resources and disk space.

Defining the source of page images 49

Brightness and contrast

Good brightness and contrast settings play an important role in OCR accuracy. Set these in the Scanner panel of the Options dialog box or in your scanner’s interface. The diagram illustrates an optimum brightness setting. After loading an image, check its appearance. If characters are thick and touching, lighten the brightness. If characters are thin and broken, darken it. Then rescan the page.

Unsuitable

Toler ab le

Good

Best

Good

Toler ab le

50 Processing documents

Unsuitable

Scanning with an ADF

The best way to scan multi-page documents is with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). Simply load pages in the correct order into the ADF. Place blank pages if you want to save your document to multiple output files using the Create a new file at each blank page option. See “Saving recognition results” on page 82.

If you have a document longer than the capacity of your ADF, select Automatically prompt for more pages in the Process panel of the Options dialog box. Then a dialog box lets you add further page batches and signal when all pages are scanned.

Chapter 3

You can scan double-sided documents with an ADF. A duplex scanner will manage this automatically. For non-duplex scanners, select Scan double-sided pages in the Scanner panel of the Options dialog box. Then you can scan the document in just a few passes, with even pages grouped together and odd pages also grouped. OmniPage Pro will merge the pages for you.

Scanning without an ADF

Using OmniPage’s scanner interface, you can scan multi-page documents efficiently from a flatbed scanner, even without an ADF. Select Automatically scan pages in the Scanner panel of the Options dialog box, and define a pause value in seconds. Then the scanner will make scanning passes automatically, pausing between each scan by the defined number of seconds, giving you time to place the next page. A dialog box allows you finish the pause early or request a longer pause and to specify when the last page is scanned.

To scan books two pages at a time, select Look for facing pages in the Process panel of the Options dialog box. The program will split the incoming images into two pages and deskew them independently.

Describing the layout of the document

Before starting recognition you are requested to describe the layout of the incoming pages to assist the auto-zoning process. When you do automatic processing, auto-zoning always runs unless you specify a template that does not contain a process zone or background. When you do manual processing, auto-zoning sometimes runs. See online Help: When does auto-zoning run? Here are your input description choices:

Automatic

Choose this to let the program make all auto-zoning decisions. It decides whether text is in columns or not, whether an item is a graphic or text to be recognized and whether to place tables or not. Choose Automatic if your document contains pages with different or unknown layouts. Choose it for a page with multiple columns and a table, and for any pages with more than one table.

Describing the layout of the document 51

Single column, no table

Choose this setting if your pages contain only one column of text and no table. Business letters or pages from a book are normally like this. Choose it also for a page with words or numbers arranged in columns if you do not want these placed in a table or decolumnized or treated as separate columns. Graphics may be detected.

Multiple columns, no table

Choose this if some of your pages contain text in columns and you want this decolumnized or kept in separate columns, similar to the original layout. Columns can be retained in the output document, either with frames (if True Page is selected at export time) or without frames (if Flowing Page is selected). If tabular data is encountered, it is likely to be treated as flowing text. Graphics may be detected.

Single column with table

Choose this if your page contains only one column of text and a table. Auto-zoning will not look for columns but will try to find a table and place it in a grid in the Text Editor. You can later specify whether to export it in a grid or as tab separated text columns. Graphics may be detected.

Spreadsheet

Choose this if your whole page consists of a table which you want to export to a spreadsheet program, or have treated as single table. No flowing text or graphics zones will be detected.

52 Processing documents

Custom

Choose this for maximum control over auto-zoning. You can prevent or encourage the detection of columns, graphics and tables. Make your settings in the OCR panel of the Options dialog box.

Te m p la t e

Choose a zone template file if you wish to have its background value, zones and properties applied to all acquired pages from now on. The template zones are also applied to the current page, replacing any existing zones. They will also be applied to pre-existing pages without zones when they are (re-)recognized. See “Using zone templates” on page 61.

If auto-zoning yielded unexpected recognition results, use manual processing to rezone individual pages and re-recognize them.

Chapter 3

Zones and backgrounds

Zones define areas on the page to be processed or ignored. Zones are rectangular or irregular, with vertical and horizontal sides. Page images in a document have a background value: process or ignore (the latter is more typical). Background values can be changed with the tools shown. Zones can be drawn on page backgrounds with the tools shown:

Backgrounds

Zones

Process

Process Ignore Text Table Graphic

Process areas (in process zones or backgrounds) are auto-zoned when they are sent to recognition.

Ignore areas (in ignore zones or backgrounds) are dropped from processing. No text is recognized and no image is transferred.

Ignore

Automatic zoning

Automatic zoning allows the program to detect blocks of text, headings, pictures and other elements on a page and draw zones to enclose them. It assigns zone types and properties to those zones. Auto-zoning runs on whole pages when you do automatic processing, unless you have a template loaded. A workflow can contain auto-zoning. You can also specify auto-zoning when doing manual processing, as follows:

Auto-zone a whole page

Acquire a page. It appears with a process background. Draw no zones on it and check in the Layout Description drop-down list that a zone template is not loaded. Click the Perform OCR button. You can select several zone-less pages to have them auto-zoned and recognized together.

Auto-zone a part of a page

Acquire a page. It appears with a process background. Draw a zone. The background changes to ignore. Draw text, table or graphic zones to enclose areas you want manually zoned. Draw process zones to enclose areas you want auto-zoned. After recognition the process zones will be replaced with one or more text, table or graphic zones.

Zones and backgrounds 53

Auto-zone a page background

Acquire a page. It appears with a process background. Draw a zone. The background changes to ignore. Draw text, table or graphic zones to enclose areas you want manually zoned. Click the Process background tool (shown) to set a process background. Draw ignore zones over parts of the page you do not need. After recognition the page will return with an ignore background and new zones round all elements found on the background.

Manual zoning

First we present two examples on zones and backgrounds. Then we detail the zone types. Lastly we explain how to draw and work with zones. In these examples the numbers refer to the table on the following page.

Drawing zones on an ignore background:

Before recognition:

After recognition:

Background remains as ignore.

Drawing zones on a process background:

After recognition:

Background is changed to ignore.

Zone 4 returns as a set of zones, in this case to handle three columns of text and a photo.

Zone 6 is absorbed into the background. All zones on the left side of the page were automatically created.

54 Processing documents

Chapter 3

No. Typ e What happens:

1 Text zone OCR runs and generates text.

2 Table zone OCR runs, text is placed in a table grid.

3 Graphic zone Image is embedded in recognized page.

4 Process zone Auto-zoning creates one or more zones,

5 Process background

6 Ignore zone

7 Ignore background

decides their types and processes their contents.

Nothing

Automatically drawn zones and template zones have solid borders:

Manually drawn or modified zones have dotted borders:

Zones do not have a reading order. Reordering of recognized elements can be done in the Text Editor. See “Text and image editing” on page 73. On-the-fly zoning is described in chapter 4. See “On-the-fly editing” on page 75.

Zone types and properties

Each zone has a zone type. Zones containing text can also have a zone contents setting: alphanumeric or numeric. The zone type and zone contents together constitute the zone properties. Right-click in a zone for a shortcut menu allowing you to change the zone’s properties. Select multiple zones with Shift+clicks to change their properties in one move.

The Image toolbar provides five zone drawing tools, one for each type. A zone’s type is shown by an icon in its top left corner, and by the icon and zone border color. Here are the tools and the colors:

Process zone (blue)

Use this to draw a process zone, to define a page area where auto-zoning will run. After recognition, this zone will be replaced by one or more zones with automatically determined zone types. You normally draw

Zones and backgrounds 55

process zones on an ignore background. Draw a process zone to enclose columns of text to have them handled automatically. They will be decolumnized in the Text Editor’s NF view and RFP view, but kept in columns in True Page view.

Ignore zone (olive)

Use this to draw an ignore zone, to define a page area you do not want transferred to the Text Editor. Auto-zoning will not place zones here. To exclude a given page area from many pages (for example a header or page numbers), place an ignore zone in a template. You normally draw ignore zones on a process background.

Tex t zone ( brown )

Use this to draw a text zone. Draw it over a single block of text. Zone contents will be treated as flowing text, without columns being found. If you want columns of text to be handled automatically, enclose them in a process zone.

Table zone (blue)

Use this to have the zone contents treated as a table. Table grids can be automatically detected, or placed manually as described in the next section. Table zones must be rectangular. The Text Editor displays the table in an editable grid. For many output file types, you can choose whether to export tables in grids or in columns separated by tabs.

56 Processing documents

Graphic zone (green)

Use this to enclose a picture, diagram, drawing, signature or anything you want transferred to the Text Editor as an embedded image, and not as recognized text. Embedded images can be exported with the document to target applications supporting graphics.

Text and table zones have a zone content setting. Alphanumeric contents validates all characters needed for your language choice. Recognition results from a numeric zone will contain only numbers and number-related punctuation. No letters will be placed. Use the zone’s shortcut menu to change this setting.

Right-click outside a zone for a shortcut menu tailored for the whole image. It allows you to zoom in or out or rotate the image. When an image is rotated, all zones on it are deleted.

Chapter 3

Working with zones

The Image toolbar provides zone editing tools. One is always selected. When you no longer want the service of a tool, click a different tool. Some tools on this toolbar are grouped. Only the last selected tool from the group is visible. To select a visible tool, click it. To select a hidden tool, hold down the mouse button on the triangle at the bottom right of the visible tool until the additional tools appear, then click the tool you want.

Draw a single zone

Select the zone drawing tool of the desired type, then click and drag the cursor. In these examples, this is shown by the arrow going from A to B. Dragging from top left to bottom right is also possible.

Only rectangular zones can be drawn; zones (except table zones) can be made irregular after they are drawn.

To resize a zone, select it by clicking in it, move the cursor to a side or corner, catch a handle and move it to the desired location. It cannot overlap another zone.

Make an irregular zone by addition

Draw a partially overlapping zone of the same type:

existing zone

new zone

resulting zone

Zones and backgrounds 57

Join two zones of the same type

Draw an overlapping zone of the same type.

existing zones

new zone

resulting zone

Make an irregular zone by subtraction

Draw an overlapping zone of the same type as the background (in this example, on an ignore background).

existing zone on an ignore background

new ignore zone

resulting zone

Split a zone

Draw a splitting zone of the same type as the background (in this example, on a process background).

58 Processing documents

existing text zone on a process background

new process zone

resulting zones

The following zone shapes are prohibited:

Chapter 3

Indented along the bottom

Indented along the top

Hole in the middle

To expand a zone more quickly than using its resizing handles, draw a zone of the same type to completely enclose it. The smaller zone is replaced by the larger one. To replace a set of zones of whatever type with a single zone, draw a larger zone of the desired type to completely enclose them. All the smaller zones are replaced by the larger one.

When you draw a new zone that partly overlaps an existing zone of a different type, it does not really overlap it; the new zone replaces the overlapped part of the existing zone. Diagrams in the online Help topic Drawing zones manually clarify these two topics.

Speed zoning

This lets you do manual zoning quickly. Activate the zone selection cursor, then move the cursor over the page image. Shaded areas will appear showing the auto-detected zones. Double-click to transform a shaded area into a zone. Speed zoning is useful when you want to process only parts of a page. For example, with classified advertisements, just double-click on those that interest you – everything else on the page will be ignored.

Table grids in the image

After automatic processing you may see table zones placed on a page. They are denoted with a table zone icon in the top left corner of the zone. To change a rectangular zone to or from a table zone, use its shortcut menu. You can also draw table type zones, but they must remain rectangular.

You draw or move table dividers to determine where gridlines will appear when the table is placed in the Text Editor. You can draw or resize a table

Table grids in the image 59

zone (provided it stays rectangular) to discard unneeded columns or rows from the outer edges of a table.

The five grouped table handling tools on the Imaging toolbar can be used if the current page contains a table type zone. If the tool you need is not visible, click the triangle on the bottom right of the visible tool to display all the tools, then click the desired one.

Use the table tools and their cursors as follows:

Insert row dividers

Click the tool then click at the location in a table zone where you want to place a row divider. Avoid placing a divider so it cuts through text.

Insert column dividers

Click the tool then click at the location in a table zone where you want to place a column divider.

Move dividers

Click the tool and move the cursor to the row or column divider to be moved. It displays a double-headed arrow. Drag the divider as desired. You cannot drag it beyond its neighbor. Avoid placing dividers so they cut through text.

60 Processing documents

Remove dividers

Click the tool then click on a single row or column divider you want to delete. Do this if a divider is wrongly located, or if you want to change the appearance of the table in the final document. For example, you can place two columns of data in a single column by deleting the divider between the columns.

Place/Remove all dividers

Click this tool and click its cursor icon inside a table zone without dividers. Dividers will be auto-detected and placed. Click it in a table with dividers to make them all disappear.

Press the Ctrl key as you click if you want to place, move or delete a divider in the current cell only.

You can specify line formatting for table borders and grids from a shortcut menu. You will have greater choice for editing borders and shading in the Text Editor after recognition.

Chapter 3

Using zone templates

A template contains a page background value and a set of zones and their properties, stored in a file. A zone template file can be loaded to have template zones used during recognition. Load a template file in the Layout Description drop-down list or from the Tools menu. You can browse to network locations to load templates created by others.

When you load a template, its background and zones are placed:

◆ on the current page, replacing any zones already there

◆ on all further acquired pages

◆ on pre-existing pages sent to (re-)recognition without any zones.

With manual processing the template zones in the first two cases can be viewed and modified before recognition.

With automatic processing the template zones can be viewed and modified only after recognition.

With workflow processing, a load template step can be followed by a manual zoning step, so you can see the template zones and modify or supplement them before recognition.

Templates accept ignore and process zones and backgrounds. They can therefore be useful to define which parts of the pages to process with auto-zoning, and which parts to ignore. Process zones or process background areas from a template may be replaced during recognition by a set of smaller zones; specific zone types will be assigned to these zones.

How to save a zone template

Select a background value and prepare zones on a page. Check their locations and properties. Click Zone Template... in the Tools menu. In the dialog box, select

[zones on page] and click Save, then assign a name

and optionally a different path. Choose a network location to share the template file. Click OK. The new zone template remains loaded.

How to modify a zone template

Load the template and acquire a suitable image with manual processing. The template zones appear. Modify the zones and/or properties as

Using zone templates 61

desired. Open the Zone Template Files dialog box. The current template is selected. Click Save and then Close.

How to unload a template

Select a non-template setting in the Layout Description drop-down list. The template zones are not removed from the current or existing pages, but template zones will no longer be used for future processing. You can also open the Zone Template Files dialog box, select

[none] and click the

Set As Current button. In this case, the layout description setting returns to Automatic.

How to replace one template with another

Select a different template in the Layout Description drop-down list, or open the Zone Template Files dialog box, select the desired template and click the Set As Current button. Zones from the new template are applied to the current page, replacing any existing zones. They are also applied as explained above.

How to remove a template file

Open the Zone Template Files dialog box. Select a template and click the Remove button. Zones already placed by this template are not removed. Template files can be deleted only from the operating system.

How to include a template file in an OPD

Load the template, then click the Save button in the Standard toolbar and choose the file type OmniPage Document (Extended). That means the template will travel with the OPD if it is sent to a new location. When the extended OPD file is opened later, the included zone template will be shown in the Zone Template dialog box as

[embedded] and can be

saved to a new named template file at the new location.

62 Processing documents

Templates are available in Direct OCR, in the Workflow Assistant and also for use in Batch Manager jobs.

Chapter 4

Proofing and editing

Recognition results are placed in the Text Editor. These can be recognized texts, tables and embedded graphics. This WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor offers the following features, detailed in this chapter:

◆ The editor display and views

◆ Proofreading OCR results

◆ Verifying text

◆ User dictionaries

◆ Languages

◆ Tr a i n i n g

◆ Text and image editing

◆ On-the-fly editing

◆ Reading text aloud

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 63

The editor display and views

The Text Editor displays recognized texts and can mark words that were suspected during recognition with wavy underlines:

◆ Green – Non-dictionary words: These were recognized

confidently, but are not found in any active dictionary: standard, user or professional.

◆ Blue – Words with suspect characters: These contain

unrecognized characters or are dictionary-approved words containing characters recognized with lower confidence.

◆ Red – Suspect words: These are likely to be non-dictionary

words with one or more suspect characters, but may also be suspect for other reasons.

Choose to have non-dictionary words marked or not in the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box. All markers can be shown or hidden as selected in the Text Editor panel of the Options dialog box. You can also show or hide non-printing characters and header/footer indicators. The Text Editor panel also lets you define a unit of measurement for the program and a word wrap setting for use in all Text Editor views except No Formatting view.

64 Proofing and editing

OmniPage Pro 14 can display pages with three levels of formatting. You can switch freely between them with the three buttons at the bottom left of the Text Editor or from the View menu. Graphics and tables can appear in all views. Here are the main differences between the views:

No Formatting view

This displays plain decolumnized left-aligned text in a single font and font size, with the same line breaks as in the original document. Most formatting buttons and dialog boxes are disabled. Rulers are not displayed. You may find this view convenient for verifying and editing the text.

Retain Fonts and Paragraphs view

This displays decolumnized text with font and paragraph styling. The horizontal ruler is displayed. You may find this view convenient for verifying, editing and modifying the text together with its styling.

Chapter 4

True Page view

Tru e Pag e

view tries to conserve as much of the formatting of the original document as possible. Character and paragraph styling is retained. All page elements, including columns, are placed in boxes and frames. Reading order can be displayed by arrows. See from page 73.

The formatting level for export is chosen separately at export time.

Proofreading OCR results

After a page is recognized, the recognition results appear in the Text Editor. Proofreading starts automatically if that was requested in the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box. You can start proofing manually any time. Work as follows:

1. Click the Proofread OCR tool in the Standard toolbar, or choose

Proofread OCR... in the Tools menu.

This tells why the word is marked.

Edit panel: The marked word is shown in its marker color: red, blue or green.

This window shows the relevant part of the original image. Click inside it to enlarge or reduce the display.

2. Proofing starts from the current page, but skips text already proofed.

If a suspected error is detected, the OCR Proofreader dialog box colors the suspect word in its context, and provides a picture of how it originally looked in the image.

The image of the suspect word is highlighted.

Both parts of a word split by hyphenation will be shown.

Drag a corner or the bottom of the dialog box to resize it.

Proofreading OCR results 65

3. If the recognized word is correct, click Ignore or Ignore All to move

to the next suspect word. Click Add to add it to the current user dictionary and move to the next suspect word.

4. If the recognized word is not correct, modify the word in the Edit

panel or select a dictionary suggestion. Click Change or Change All to implement the change and move to the next suspect word. Click Add to add the changed word to the current user dictionary and move to the next suspect word.

5. Color markers are removed from words in the Text Editor as they are

proofread. You can switch to the Text Editor during proofing to make corrections there. Use the Resume button to restart proofing. Click Page Ready to skip to the next page and Document Ready or Close to stop proofreading before the end of the document is reached.

Voice-driven proofing is available in OmniPage Pro 14 Office. See “Voice recognition” on page 107. The proofreader’s suggestions are numbered. Speak the number of the suggestion you want to accept.

66 Proofing and editing

A page is marked with the proofed icon on its thumbnail and in the Document Manager if proofing ran to the end of the page.

If markers were hidden in the Text Editor when proofing is started or Find Next Suspect is chosen, the markers become shown and remain shown after proofing.

If Mark non-dictionary words is turned off in the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box, proofing will stop only on words marked red or blue, and not on nondictionary words. This is useful when checking pages with many non-dictionary words, such as product catalogues containing codes and bibliographies containing many proper names.

Use Recheck Current Page in the Tools menu to run a new spelling check on a page that has already been proofed. Do this to check words typed or pasted in the Text Editor after proofing was done. This works even if Mark non-dictionary words is turned off in the Proofing panel.

Chapter 4

Verifying text

After performing OCR, you can compare any part of the recognized text against the corresponding part of the original image, to verify that the text was recognized correctly. Work as follows:

To do this: Use this:

Turn verifier on F9 or verifier tool

Turn verifier off Esc or F9 or verifier tool

Turn verifier on/off temporarily F8: press and hold down

Show verifier until next keystroke Double-click on word

Zoom display in Alt + Num + or click in verifier

Zoom display out Alt + Num – or click in verifier

Make verifier dynamic or docked/floating Alt + Num /

Dynamic context (scroll through 3 values) Alt + Num *

The verifier tool is in the Formatting toolbar. The verifier can also be controlled from the Tools menu. Hover the cursor over a verifier display to obtain the verifier toolbar. Use it as follows:

Drag between float and docked

Text Editor

Verifier Toolbar:

zoom in/out

to float or dock (returns to last state)

to dynamic

veri

ier tool (on/off)

How much context for dynamic verifier?

• one word

• three words (current + neighbors)

• whole image line

Verifying text 67

You should proofread and verify texts before doing large-scale editing. If you cut and paste large blocks of text, the links between text and image may be disturbed.

You can use OmniPage Pro’s Text-to-Speech facility to have the recognized text read aloud as another way of verifying text. You can hear the text letter-by-letter, word-by-word, line-by-line, sentence-by-sentence or in whole pages. See the section “Reading text aloud” on page 76.

User dictionaries

The program has built-in dictionaries for many languages. These assist during recognition and may offer suggestions during proofing. They can be supplemented by user dictionaries. You can save any number of user dictionaries, but only one can be loaded at a time. A dictionary called Custom is the default user dictionary for Microsoft Word.

Starting a user dictionary

Click Add in the OCR Proofreader dialog box with no user dictionary loaded or open the User Dictionary Files dialog box from the Tools menu and click New. You will be asked to name the dictionary immediately.

Loading or unloading a user dictionary

Do this from the OCR panel of the Options dialog box or from the User Dictionary Files dialog box. Select a dictionary file to load it or unload a user dictionary. You can browse for a file.

[none] to

68 Proofing and editing

Editing or removing a user dictionary

Add words by loading a user dictionary and then clicking Add in the OCR Proofreader dialog box. You can add and delete words by clicking Edit in the User Dictionary Files dialog box. While editing a user dictionary, you can import a word list from a plain text file to add words to the dictionary quickly. Each word must be on a separate line with no punctuation at the start or end of the word. The Remove button lets you remove the selected user dictionary from the list.

To embed a user dictionary in an OmniPage Document, load it and save to the file type OmniPage Document (Extended). When you load an OPD with an embedded user dictionary, it appears in the list of user dictionaries as

[embedded]. You can edit it and save it to a new name.

Chapter 4

Languages

The program can read over 110 languages with three alphabets: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. See the list in the OCR panel of the Options dialog box. It shows which languages have dictionary support. A listing is also provided on the ScanSoft web site.

In addition to user dictionaries, specialized dictionaries are available for certain professions (currently medical, legal and financial) for some languages. See the list and make selections in the OCR panel of the Options dialog box.

The program identifies the language of recognized texts and displays it in the status bar. This language marking is exported with the document. Use Set Language... in the Tools menu to change the language marking for selected text. This does not change the recognition language(s).

Training

Training is the process of changing the OCR solutions assigned to character shapes in the image. It is useful for uniformly degraded documents or when an unusual typeface is used throughout a document. Training will be less useful for texts with random distortions. Here is an example, based on the letter “g”, which can be printed in different ways:

The first two examples do not need training, because both shapes are normal for the letter “g” and the program can handle them. The third example could benefit from training because the shape of “g” is unusual, and all instances of “g” in the text are likely to look like this. The fourth example is not good for training, because the first “g” is poorly printed, and this shape is unlikely to appear again in the document.

Languages 69

You can use training to improve recognition of special symbols such as @, ® and © or to recognize supported accented letters more reliably. The purpose of training is not to teach the program to read characters from non-supported languages or alphabets.

OmniPage Pro 14 offers two types of training: manual training and automatic training (IntelliTrain). Data coming from both types of training are combined and available for saving to a training file.

When you leave a page on which training data was generated, you will be asked how to apply it to other existing pages in the document.

Manual training

To do manual training, place the insertion point in front of the character you want to train, or select a group of characters (up to one word) and choose Train Character... from the Tools menu or the shortcut menu. You will see an enlarged view of the character(s) to be trained, along with the current OCR solution. Change this to the desired solution and click OK. The program takes this training and examines the rest of the page. If it finds candidate words to change, the Check Training dialog box lists these. Incorrect words should be re-trained before the list is approved.

70 Proofing and editing

For guidance on using the Train Character and Check Training dialog boxes, please consult their context-sensitive help or the online help topic Manual training and its related topics.

IntelliTrain

IntelliTrain is an automated form of training. It takes input from the corrections you make during proofing. When you make a change, it remembers the character shape involved, and your proofing change. It searches other similar character shapes in the document, especially in suspect words. It assesses whether to apply the user correction or not.

You can turn IntelliTrain on or off in the OCR panel of the Options dialog box.

The following shows how IntelliTrain works, using the original image. Our example involves the letters c and e. With some typefaces and

OmniPage Pro read this as bcnefit.

You changed it during proofing to benefit.

Chapter 4

scanning settings, the horizontal line in e can become very thin, leading to OCR errors that IntelliTrain can repair.

IntelliTrain remembers this shape and the rule:

This is not c.

This is e.

IntelliTrain changes:

thcrc to there likc to like Whcncvcr to Whenever

etc.

IntelliTrain remembers the training data it collects, and adds it to any manual training you have done. This training can be saved to a training file for future use with similar documents.

Training files

If you want to be prompted to save your unsaved training data when you close the document, select that option in the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box. Unsaved training data is stored in an OmniPage Document. If you do not save the document as an OPD, unsaved training is discarded when the document is closed. To save a training file into an OPD, load it and save to the file type OmniPage Document (Extended).

Saving training to file, loading, editing and unloading training files are all done in the Training Files dialog box. Open this from the Proofing panel of the Options dialog box or the Tools menu. The program offers a

Training 71

This appears if you load an OPD with an embedded training file. You can edit it and also save it to a new named training file.

Select this, click Save and type in a name to save a new training file.

Select this to unload a training file.

default location, but you can specify a different path, for instance on a local network, to share training files with other users.

Click this to edit the selected training file in the Edit Training dialog box.

Use this also to save new training into a loaded training file. It is listed as:

[modified]

Unsaved training can be edited in the Edit Training dialog box, an asterisk is displayed in the title bar in place of a training file name. It remains unsaved when you close the Edit Training dialog box. Save it in the Training Files dialog box.

A training file can be also edited; its name appears in the title bar. If it has unsaved training added to it, an asterisk appears after its name. Both the unsaved and the modified training are saved when you close the dialog box.

You are editing your unsaved training.

This frame is grayed. It has been deleted. To undelete it, select it again and press the Delete key. Characters marked as deleted are really deleted when you close the dialog box.

72 Proofing and editing

The Edit Training dialog box displays frames containing a character shape and an OCR solution assigned to that shape. Click a frame to select it. Then you can delete it with the Delete key, or change the assignation. Use arrow keys to move to the next or previous frame.

Double-click a frame or press Enter to change its OCR solution. Enter the new solution in the text box that appears and press Enter. Changed assignations appear in red.

This frame is selected. The top part shows the shape from the image. The bottom part shows

the assigned OCR solution.

Chapter 4

Text and image editing

OmniPage Pro has a WYSIWYG Text Editor, providing many editing facilities. These work very similarly to those in leading word processors.

Editing character attributes

In all views except No Formatting view, you can change the font type, size and attributes (bold, italic, underlined) for selected text. Use the Formatting toolbar or the Font dialog box from the Format menu. The latter also offers subscripts, superscripts and colored text or backgrounds.

In No Formatting view, use the Formatting toolbar to specify one font type and size to be applied to the whole document. This is not used for export, nor transferred to other views; their previous settings are restored.

Open the Font Matching dialog box from the OCR panel of the Options dialog box before OCR, to specify which fonts to use for texts entering the Text Editor.

Editing paragraph attributes

In all views except No Formatting view, you can change the alignment of selected paragraphs and apply bulleting to paragraphs. Use the Formatting toolbar or the Paragraph dialog box from the Format menu. The latter allows you to modify indents, line spacing and spacing between paragraphs. The Text Editor’s horizontal ruler lets you define indent and tab positions easily. Advanced tab settings are done in the Tabs dialog box from the Format menu. Numbered and bulleted paragraphs can be detected and edited.

Paragraph styles

Paragraph styles are auto-detected during recognition. A list of styles is built up and presented in a selection box on the left of the Formatting toolbar. Use this to assign a style to selected paragraphs. Use the Style dialog box from the Format menu to rename or modify a style and to define a new style. When you save a document to file, you can choose whether to export the paragraph styles with the document or not. This is valid only if the target application supports paragraph styles.

Graphics

You can edit the contents of a selected graphic if you have an image editor in your computer. Click Edit Picture in the Tools menu. This will

Text and image editing 73

activate the image editor associated with BMP files in your Windows system, and load the graphic. Edit the graphic, then close the editor to have it re-embedded in the Text Editor. Do not change the graphic’s size, resolution or type, because this will prevent the re-embedding.

Tables

Tables are displayed in the Text Editor in grids. Move the cursor into a table area. It changes appearance, allowing you to move gridlines. You can also use the Text Editor’s rulers to modify a table. Modify the placement of text in table cells with the alignment buttons in the Formatting toolbar and the tab controls in the ruler. When saving the document to some file types, you can choose whether to have the tables exported in grids or as tab separated or space separated columns.

Hyperlinks

Web page and e-mail addresses can be detected and placed as links in recognized text. Choose Hyperlink... in the Format menu to edit an existing link or create a new one. A new link can be to a web page or a file. Use a shortcut menu to delete a link. Turn hyperlink detection on or off in the Process panel of the Options dialog box.

Editing in True Page

Page elements are contained in text boxes, table boxes and picture boxes. These usually correspond to text, table and graphic zones in the image. Click inside an element to see the box border; they have the same coloring as the corresponding zones. The online Help topic True Page provides details on the operations summarized here.

74 Proofing and editing

Frames have gray borders and enclose one or more boxes. They are placed when a visible border is detected in an image. Format frame and table borders and shading with a shortcut menu or by choosing Table... in the Format menu. Text box shading can be specified from its shortcut menu. To call up a shortcut menu, right-click inside an element away from a marked word.

Multicolumn areas have pink borders and enclose one or more boxes. They are auto-detected and show which text will be treated as flowing columns when exported with the Flowing Page formatting level. Use shortcut menus to ungroup multicolumn areas and frames, allowing their

Chapter 4

elements to be modified. You can also group elements into frames or multicolumn areas.

Reading order can be displayed and changed. Click the Show reading order tool in the Formatting toolbar to have the order shown by arrows. Click again to remove the arrows.

Click the Change reading order tool for a set of reordering buttons in place of the Formatting toolbar. Context-sensitive help explains their use, as does Reading order in online Help. A changed order is applied in NF and RFP views. It modifies the way the cursor moves through a page when it is exported as True Page.

On-the-fly editing

This allows you to modify a recognized page through re-zoning, without having to re-process the whole page. When on-the-fly editing is enabled, zone changes (deleting, drawing, resizing, changing type) immediately make changes in the recognized page. Conversely, when you modify elements in the Text Editor’s True Page view, this changes the zones on that page. On-the-fly zoning can also be used with unrecognized pages.

Two linked tools on the Image toolbar control on-the-fly zoning. One of these tools is always active whenever no recognition is in progress.

Click this to activate on-the-fly editing. The red signal shows there are no stored zoning changes.

Click this to turn on-the-fly editing off. Your zoning changes are stored; the on-the-fly tool displays a green signal to show there are stored changes. To activate these changes, do one of the following:

Click the on-the-fly tool with a green signal. The zoning changes will cause changes in the Text Editor.

Click the Perform OCR button to have the whole page (re)recognized, including your zone changes.

For details on how changes are handled in on-the-fly zoning and their effects in the Text Editor views, see On-the-fly processing in online Help.

On-the-fly editing 75

Reading text aloud

The ScanSoft RealSpeakTM speech facility is provided for the visually impaired, but it can also be useful to anyone during text checking and verification. The speaking is controlled by movements of the insertion point in the Text Editor which can be mouse or keyboard driven.

To hear text: Use these keys:

One character at a time, forward or back

Current word Ctrl + Numpad 1

One word to the right Ctrl + right arrow

One word to the left Ctrl + left arrow

A single line Place the insertion point in the line

Next line Down arrow

Previous line Up arrow

Current sentence Ctrl + Numpad 2

From insertion point to end of sentence Ctrl + Numpad 6

From start of sentence to insertion point Ctrl + Numpad 4

Current page Ctrl + Numpad 3

From top of current page to insertion point Ctrl + Home

From insertion point to end of current page Ctrl + End

Previous, next or any page Ctrl + PgUp, PgDown or navigation buttons

Typed characters

Right or left arrow. Letter, number or punctuation names are spoken.

Each typed character is pronounced, one by one, including punctuation.

The Text-to-Speech facility is enabled or disabled with the Tools menu item Speech Mode or with the F5 key. A second menu item Speech Settings... allows you to select a voice (for example, male or female for a given language), a reading speed and the volume. You must ensure the language selection is appropriate for the text you want to hear.

76 Proofing and editing

Chapter 4

The three basic speech keys are grouped together on the numeric keypad.

1 2 3

Speak current word

Speak current sentence

Speak current page

You also have the following keyboard controls:

To do this: Use this:

Pause/Resume Ctrl + Numpad 5

Set speed higher Ctrl + Numpad +

Set speed lower Ctrl + Numpad –

Restore speed Ctrl + Numpad *

It is planned to provide RealSpeak programs for the following languages: English (UK and US), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish. Please consult the Readme file for the latest information. All speech systems will be installed with OmniPage Pro if you choose a complete installation. If you perform a custom installation, you can choose the languages you need. If you later try to read text aloud in a language you did not install, you will be invited to install the required module without interrupting your OmniPage session, provided you have the program CD on hand. Or, you can use the Add/Remove Programs facility in your system’s Control Panel.

The RealSpeak modules are also used when saving the text from a document into a wave audio file. This is done by choosing Save to File in the Export drop-down list and choosing Wave Audio Converter as file type. Click Converter options to specify the voice/language and a reading speed.

Reading text aloud 77

78 Proofing and editing

Chapter 5

Saving and exporting

Once you have acquired at least one image for a document, you can export the image(s) to file. Once you have recognized at least one page, you can export recognition results – a single page, selected pages or the whole document – to a target application by saving to file, copying to Clipboard or sending to a mailing application. Saving as an OmniPage Document is always possible.

This chapter presents the following topics:

◆ Saving OmniPage Documents

◆ Export Results button

◆ Saving original images

◆ Saving recognition results

• Selecting a formatting level

• Selecting converter options

• Using multiple converters

•Saving to PDF

• Converting from PDF

◆ Copying pages to Clipboard

◆ Sending pages by mail

◆ Other export targets

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 79

A document remains in OmniPage Pro after export. This allows you to save, copy or send its pages repeatedly, for example with different formatting levels, using different file types, names or locations. You can also add or re-recognize pages or modify the recognized text.

With automatic processing and in Batch Manager jobs, you specify the first saving destination before processing starts. When the last available page is recognized (or proofread, if that was requested), an exporting dialog box appears.

You can specify export any time the program is not busy. If you ask to export a document with unrecognized pages, you will be asked whether they should be recognized first. If you answer No, only results from recognized pages will be exported. If zones have been modified on recognized pages, you will be invited to re-recognize those pages before exporting.

A workflow may contain one or more saving steps, even to different targets (for instance, to file and to mail). A Batch Manager job must contain at least one saving step. See chapter 6, “Workflows”.

Saving OmniPage Documents

80 Saving and exporting

If you want to work with your document again in OmniPage Pro in a later session, save it as an OmniPage Document. This is a special output file type. It saves the original images together with the recognition results, settings and training. See “OmniPage Documents” on page 29.

Export Results button

Exporting is done through button 3 on the OmniPage Toolbox. It lists available export targets. The picture on the left shows all possible targets. The last three appear only in OmniPage Pro 14 Office. Some appear only if access to the target is detected on your computer. Select the desired target then click the Export Results button to begin export. You can also perform exporting through the Process menu.

Chapter 5

Saving original images

You can save original images to disk in a wide variety of file types. See “File types for opening and saving images” on page 115.

1. Choose Save to File in the Export Results drop-down list. In the

dialog box that appears, select Image under Save as.

2. Choose a folder location and a file type. Type in a file name.

3. Select to save the selected zone image(s) only, the current page image,

selected page images or all images in the document. For multiple zones or multiple pages, you can have all images in a single multipage image file, providing you set TIFF, MAX, DCX or Image-only PDF as file type. Otherwise each image is placed in a separate file. OmniPage Pro adds numerical suffixes to the file name you provide, to generate unique file names.

4. Click Converter Options... if you want to specify a saving mode

(black-and-white, grayscale, color or ‘As is’), a maximum resolution and other settings. For TIFF files, you specify the compression method here.

5. Click OK to save the image(s) as specified. Zones and recognized text

are not saved with the file.

To see the size and resolution of a page image, hover the cursor over it or its thumbnail in the Image Panel. Show or hide this display in its shortcut menu.

You can save your document to five variants of PDF. Two of these save the original images, the others save recognition results. See the following sections.

You can save images to two or more file types, or save images together with recognized pages in one saving step. See “Using multiple converters” on page 86.

Saving original images 81

Select this first. It determines which other options are available.

Saving recognition results

You can save recognized pages to disk in a wide variety of file types. See “File types for saving recognition results” on page 116.

1. Choose Export Results... in the File menu, or click the Export

Results button in the OmniPage Toolbox with Save to File selected in the drop-down list.

2. The Save to File dialog box appears. Select Text under Save as.

Select this to automatically open the saved file in its target application.

Possible choices: All pages

Current page Selected pages

Select pages with the thumbnails or in the Document Manager.

82 Saving and exporting

Click this to view and change output options for the current file type.

Possible choices: Create one file for all pages

Create one file per page Create a new file at each blank page Create a new file for each image file.

3. Select a folder location and a file type for your document. Select a

page range, file options and a formatting level for the document. See “Selecting a formatting level” on page 83.

4. Type in a file name. Click Converter Options... if you want to

specify precise settings for the export. See “Selecting converter options” on page 85.

Chapter 5

5. Click OK. The document is saved to disk as specified. If Save and

Launch is selected, the exported file will appear in its target

application; that is the one associated with the selected file type in your Windows system or in the advanced saving options for your selected file type converter.

Graphics, table grids and other properties are saved in the document only if the selected file type supports them, and if these are specified for retention in the converter options for the current file type.

If more than one export file is created, OmniPage Pro will append numerical suffixes to your file name to create unique file names.

If you select Create a new file at each blank page with input from image files, you can place blank image files in the document. See “Input from image files” on page 48.

If you select Create a new file for each image file, no file name is required. Each output file will take its name from the input file that generated it, with just the extension changed.

Selecting a formatting level

The formatting level for export is defined at export time, in the saving dialog box (Save to File, Copy to Clipboard, Send in Mail or other dialog box). Three of the levels correspond to the format views of the same name in the Text Editor. However, the level to be applied for saving is independent of the formatting view displayed in the Text Editor. When exporting to file or mail, first specify a file type. This determines which formatting levels are available. A table in chapter 7 summarizes this. See “File types for saving recognition results” on page 116.

The formatting levels are:

No Formatting (NF)

This exports plain decolumnized left-aligned text in a single font and font size. When exporting to Text or Unicode file types, graphics and tables are not supported. You can export plain text to nearly all file types and target applications; in these cases graphics, tables and bullets can be retained.

Saving recognition results 83

Retain Fonts and Paragraphs (RFP)

This exports decolumnized text with font and paragraph styling, along with graphics and tables. This is available for nearly all file types.

Flowing Page (FP)

This keeps the original layout of the pages, including columns. This is done wherever possible with column and indent settings, not with text boxes or frames. Text will then flow from one column to the other, which does not happen when text boxes are used.

True Page (TP)

This keeps the original layout of the pages, including columns. This is done with text, picture and table boxes and frames. This is offered only for target applications capable of handling these. True Page formatting is the only choice for XML export and for all PDF export, except to the file type ‘PDF Edited’.

Spreadsheet

This exports recognition results in tabular form, suitable for use in spreadsheet applications.

Decolumnization for NF and RFP export is performed from left-to-right and top-to-bottom:

84 Saving and exporting

Original page

Decolumnized result

Before export, check in NF or RFP view that the decolumnized order of elements is correct. If not, switch to True Page view and click the Show reading order tool to have the order shown by arrows. Use the Change reading order tool to specify a different order. Multicolumn areas show which columns are linked. If this linking is unsuitable, ungroup the area and change the order of the elements it enclosed.

Chapter 5

Selecting converter options

Click the Converter Options... button in a saving dialog box to have precise control over the export. This brings up a dialog box with the name of the current file type. It presents a series of options tailored to this file type. First, confirm or change the formatting level, because this influences which other options are presented. Select options as desired. Online Help details how to do this.

Click Apply to have the changed settings applied to the current save only.

Click Defaults to have all settings returned to the default values for the current file type.

Click Save to have the changed settings applied to the current save and also stored as the settings to be applied in future whenever this file type is selected again for saving.

The program currently associated with the chosen file type for the Save and Launch feature is displayed at the bottom of the dialog box. Click the three dots button to specify a different program.

To make your own customized converter, prepare your settings, click New Converter..., provide a name, then click OK. Alternatively, name the converter first, change settings next and then click Save.

Saving recognition results 85

Custom converters are useful for repeated tasks, such as publishing a weekly magazine. Then all recognized pages can be exported with their formatting tailored to their intended use. You can also create a set of customized converters for a given file type defining saving options for each output formatting level, for example: RTF No Formatting, RTF Retain Fonts and Paragraphs, RTF Flowing Page and RTF True Page.

You can change converter options without saving anything to file. Call the Export Converters dialog box from the Tools menu. Three groups appear: Text converters, Image converters and Multiple converters. Select the desired converter and click the Options button. In this case, the Apply button is not available.

Using multiple converters

Multiple converters allow you to export to two or more file types in one export step. Choose Multiple in the saving dialog box:

86 Saving and exporting

The program has four sample multiple converters: Image PDF and TIFF, Word and TIFF, Word and TXT, PDF and Word. When you choose one, your pages will be saved to both file types using the file name you provide. The extension differentiates the files. To save the files to different folders, click Converter Options... and specify sub-folders. All other settings are taken from the current converter options for each file type in the multiple converter.

To make your own multiple converter, open the Export Converters dialog box from the Tools menu. Choose the heading Multiple converters and click New... to receive a list of all text converters, followed by all image converters. Checkmark the desired ones. Optionally specify sub-folder paths for each file type. Click New Converter..., specify a name and click OK.

The sample converters and those you create are dependent converters. Suppose you make a multiple converter to save to HTML and WordPad.

Chapter 5

If you later change the saving options for the simple HTML converter, these changes will also be applied in the multiple converter.

To m a ke an independent multiple converter, using the same example, select the simple HTML converter and make a new simple converter from it, naming it for instance ‘HTML for multiple’. Similarly, make a converter ‘WordPad for multiple’. Then make a new multiple converter from the two user-defined simple converters. In this way, the settings for simple saving to HTML will be independent from those in the multiple converter.

You can save pages with different formatting levels or file options to the different file types, as defined in their simple converters. A few saving operations cannot be done with multiple converters. These are:

Saving OmniPage Documents

Use a workflow with two saving steps, or perform two separate saves.

Saving to two targets

For instance, you cannot use a multiple converter to save a document to file and also send it in mail. Use a workflow with two saving steps, or perform two separate saves.

Saving different page ranges

You cannot save different page ranges to different file types, because only one set of selected pages can exist at saving time. For the same reason, a single workflow cannot be used either. Perform two separate saves or use two workflows.

OmniPage Pro offers a new export option. Turn recognized text into an audio wave file for later listening, using ScanSoft RealSpeak. A multiple converter is useful for this, allowing you to save the document to file and generate a wave file in one saving step. You must specify the reading language in the converter options for the wave file type.

Saving recognition results 87

Saving to PDF

You have five choices when saving to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The first four are presented as Text converters, the last one is listed among the Image converters.

PDF (Normal):

Pages are exported as they appeared in the Text Editor in True Page view. The PDF file can be viewed and searched in a PDF viewer and edited in a PDF editor.

PDF Edited:

Use this if you have made significant editing changes in the recognition results. You have three formatting level choices, including True Page. The PDF file can be viewed, searched and edited.

PDF with image on text:

The PDF file is viewable only and cannot be modified in a PDF editor. The original images are exported, but there is a linked text file behind each image, so the text can be searched. A found word is highlighted in the image.

PDF with image substitutes:

As for PDF (Normal), but words containing reject and suspect characters have image overlays, so these uncertain words display as they were in the original document. The PDF file can be viewed, searched and edited.

88 Saving and exporting

PDF, image only:

The original images are exported. The PDF file is viewable only and cannot be modified in a PDF editor and text cannot be searched.

OmniPage Pro 14 Office allows you to create signed, tagged or encrypted PDF files. To do this, select a PDF file type, click Converter Options... and make the necessary choices.

OmniPage Pro 14 Office is supplied with a PDF printer facility. This allows documents inside any print-capable application to be converted to the PDF (Normal) format. Once OmniPage is installed, a new printer, called “ScanSoft PDF Printer” will appear in your Print dialog boxes. Click Properties... to set PDF creation norms. When you click OK you are invited to specify a path and name for the PDF file.

Chapter 5

Converting from PDF

OmniPage Pro 14 Office is supplied with a separate program from ScanSoft: the PDF Converter for Microsoft Word. This allows you to convert PDF files into Word documents quickly and easily. Once OmniPage Pro is installed, PDF becomes available as a file type in the Microsoft Word File Open dialog box. In most cases the conversion can be done without invoking OmniPage Pro. It also places a PDF to Word button in the Microsoft Outlook toolbar to perform conversion of PDF files attached to mail messages.

The PDF Converter has its own help system, to be found in the Help menu in Microsoft Word.

Copying pages to Clipboard

You can copy the recognition results from the current page, selected pages or all document pages to the Clipboard. The copying is reported by a progress monitor. You can then paste the Clipboard contents into another application.

Text formatting, such as bold and italics, is retained when you paste into an application that supports RTF 6.0/95 information. Otherwise, only plain or Unicode text will be pasted. Graphics are retained if the application supports insertion of images. If the target application has a command Paste Special..., use it to specify which variant to paste.

! To copy pages to the Clipboard:

◆ With automatic processing, select Copy to Clipboard as the

setting in the Export Results drop-down list on the OmniPage Toolbox. The Copy to Clipboard dialog box appears as soon as the last available page is recognized or proofed.

◆ With manual processing, select the Copy to Clipboard setting in

the Export Results drop-down list and then click its button. The Copy to Clipboard dialog box appears immediately.

◆ Specify a page range and formatting level to be used, then click

OK to start the copying.

Copying pages to Clipboard 89

Copying to Clipboard is not available in workflows or jobs.

You can perform a copy and paste operation for the current zone by drag-anddrop. Use the Select zone tool to select a zone. Then drag the cursor from the Image Panel to a target application with an open document. The zone contents will be pasted at the cursor position. OCR runs if necessary.

Sending pages by mail

You can send page images or recognized pages as one or more files attached to a mail message if you have installed a MAPI-compliant mail application, such as Microsoft Outlook.

! To send pages by e-mail:

◆ With automatic processing, select Send in Mail as the setting in

the Export Results drop-down list on the OmniPage Toolbox. The Export Options dialog box appears as soon as the last available page in the document is recognized or proofed.

◆ With manual processing, select Send in Mail as the setting in the

Export Results drop-down list and then click its button. The dialog box appears immediately.

◆ Workflows and jobs accept a Send in Mail export step.

90 Saving and exporting

At any time the program is not busy, choose Export Results/Send in Mail from the File menu to call up this dialog box.

Chapter 5

1. Choose what you want to send: Text, Image or Multiple. Text is for

recognized pages, Image for page images, Multiple to save to two or more file types at once. See “Using multiple converters” on page 86.

2. Specify a file type, a page range, a formatting level and attachment

options: one attachment for all pages, one attachment per page, new attachment at each blank page or one attachment for each input file. Set all options and click OK.

3. The eMail Properties dialog box appears. Choose to auto-send the

message or not.

4. If you choose auto-sending, supply at least one e-mail address and if

desired a subject and an attachment name. Click OK to have the mail sent. For auto-sending you must have a functioning connection to your mailing system.

5. If you do not choose auto-sending, supply an attachment name and

click OK. Log into your mail application if you are prompted to do so. Your mail application appears with the attachment(s) in a new empty message. The suitable file extension is added to your attachment name, with numerical suffixes for multiple attachments.

6. Address your mail message, add message text as desired and your mail

is ready to be sent.

The main purpose of auto-sending is for Batch Manager jobs, which may run unattended. Just ensure your e-mail connection is available at job completion time and job results (page images and/or recognized pages) can be directed to pre-defined mail recipients — and also saved to file.

In OmniPage Pro 14 Office you can also request e-mail notification of job or workflow completion. See the next chapter.

The program can detect e-mail addresses as it recognizes pages and transmits these to the Text Editor. If you click an address, your mailing application appears with a new empty message containing only the e-mail address.

Sending pages by mail 91

Other export targets

In OmniPage Pro 14 Office you can export files to other targets. You can save files to a central server (an FTP site) or to Microsoft SharePoint. Exporting choices are made in the Export Options dialog box as shown on the previous page. When you click OK you are directed to FTP or SharePoint log-in and invited to specify the required path.

If an ODMA-compliant Document Management System (DMS) is detected in your computing environment, it will be offered. If you have access to more than one DMS, the system default will apply. The ODMA server must be pre-configured to accept the file types to be exported from OmniPage Pro, as defined by their extensions. Because only one file can be saved at a time to ODMA, there are no File options choices and multiple converters are not available. Otherwise, exporting choices are as for other targets.

OmniPage Documents cannot be saved to these targets (nor sent to mail) from inside OmniPage Pro. Please save OPDs to file and transfer them to these targets outside the program.

92 Saving and exporting

Chapter 6

Workflows

Workflows contain a series of processing steps along with their settings that can be saved for future use. This makes them useful for handling recurring tasks efficiently. They process whole documents using the page order supplied as input. They often perform tasks in parallel, for instance recognizing a page while the following page is being loaded.

Batch Manager jobs are closely related to workflows. Both are created and modified with the Workflow Assistant. The main difference is that jobs have added timing instructions and it is more usual for them to be run without user attention.

This chapter presents the following topics:

◆ Work flows

•Sample workflows

•Running workflows

◆ Workflow Assistant

•Creating workflows

•Modifying workflows

◆ Batch Manager

•Creating new jobs

•Modifying jobs

• Managing and running jobs

◆ Watched folders

◆ Barcode driven workflows

◆ Voice recognition

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 93

Workflows

A workflow contains a series of processing steps and their settings. It can be saved for repeated use whenever you have a task needing the same processing. Workflows must begin with one and only one input step. But after that, they do not have to conform to the traditional 1-2-3 processing pattern. Usually a workflow will include a recognition step, but this is not compulsory. For instance, page images can be saved to image files in a different file type or to an OmniPage Document. With or without OCR, any number of saving steps are possible, even to different targets, each with their own export settings.

Workflows are designed for efficient whole-document processing. They cannot handle recognizing or saving single or selected pages from a document. You should use manual processing for such cases.

Some workflows run without user interaction. Workflows needing interaction are those with a manual zoning step, a proofing/editing step or when run-time prompting is requested for input or output file names and paths.

Sample workflows

94 Workflows

Here is a description of the four sample workflows provided with the program. Their workflow diagrams are also shown.

1. To Word and TXT

◆ Input is taken from file with run-time prompting for file names,

keeping original resolutions.

◆ Auto-zoning will run on the pages. (No step necessary for this)

◆ Recognition in English with no professional or user dictionary,

optimized for speed rather than accuracy.

◆ No proofing or editing is requested. (No step necessary for this)

◆ Save to file with pre-defined multiple converter “Word and

TXT”. Prompt at run-time for saving path and name. Settings and formatting levels will be those currently set for the two file converters contributing to this multiple converter.

2. To PDF and RTF

◆ Input is taken from file with run-time prompting for file names.

Original resolutions not to be kept for color and grayscale pages.

◆ Stop for manual zoning. (When running the workflow, use the

Document Ready button in the Toolbox to continue.)

◆ Recognition in English optimized for accuracy rather than speed.

◆ Stop for editing and proofing. (When running the workflow, use

the Document Ready button in the Toolbox to continue.)

◆ Save to PDF (Normal) with one file for all pages. True Page

formatting level is compulsory for PDF saving. Prompt for saving path and name at run-time.

◆ Send RTF file with RFP formatting in a mail message. One

attached file for each input image file. Auto-sending turned off; attachment name is ‘From Workflow’.

Workflows 1 and 2 are complete. The following workflows 3 and 4 are incomplete but complementary. If you run workflow 3 to save an OmniPage Document (OPD), then later run workflow 4 to load that OPD and finish processing it, you have a complete workflow, separated into two parts. This allows proofing to be done independently from recognition, for instance at a remote location.

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3. From images to OPD

◆ Input is taken from file with run-time prompting for file names

with ‘Keep original resolution’ turned off.

◆ Auto-zoning will run on the pages. (No step necessary for this)

◆ Recognition in English with maximum accuracy. No user or

professional dictionaries, but additional accented characters e-acute and a-circumflex.

◆ Save results to OmniPage Document to a name and folder to be

defined when the workflow is run.

◆ Save unproofed recognized pages to WordPad with no

formatting and one file for all pages. This allows quick access to the text while it awaits proofing in workflow 4.

Workflows 95

4. From OPD to Word and TIFF

◆ Input is from OPD with run-time prompting for name and

path. The idea is to open the OPD generated by workflow 3.

◆ The OPD is presented for proofing and editing. (At run-time,

the Document Ready button signals that proofing is finished).

◆ Save as OmniPage Document back to its original location and

name to overwrite the previous unproofed version.

◆ Save recognized pages to Word 2000 and page images to TIFF

with the pre-defined multiple converter “Word and TIFF”. Settings and formatting levels will be those currently set for the two file converters contributing to this multiple converter.

If you need other export settings, or you want fixed settings when using this workflow, you should use two separate saving steps. You can also use an independent multiple converter you have defined yourself. See “Using multiple converters” on page 86.

When using two incomplete workflows, recognition does not have to be in the first workflow, as in the example above. You can use the first workflow just to scan or import images. The second workflow can contain the recognition, proofing and saving. This is useful when scanning is performed at a different location.

96 Workflows

You can use these sample workflows as they are. You can modify their settings, for instance to take input from pre-specified files and with different recognition languages. See “Modifying workflows” on page 101. You can choose a sample workflow as the starting point for a new userdefined workflow. See “Creating workflows” on page 98.

Running workflows

Here is how to run a sample workflow or one you have created:

1. If your workflow takes input from scanner, place your document in

its ADF or its first page on the scanner bed.

2. Select the desired workflow from the Workflow drop-down list.

3. Press the Start button. The OmniPage Toolbox displays the steps in

the workflow and acts as a progress monitor. You do not have access

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to most program functions while the workflow is running. To stop the workflow before it completes, press the Stop button.

4. If run-time input selection is specified, the Load Images dialog box

awaits your choice of files.

5. If you requested a step requiring interaction (manual zoning or

proofing) the program presents pages for attention.

6. When a page is zoned or proofed, click the Page Ready button in the

Toolbox to move to the next page.

7. When the last page is zoned or proofed, or when you no longer want

to do zoning or proofing, press the appropriate Document Ready button on the Toolbox. Any pages without zones will be auto-zoned.

8. The document will remain displayed in OmniPage Pro if you

requested that when the workflow was created. Documents created by the sample workflows will remain displayed. If your workflow contains no saving step, you will be invited to save it to an OmniPage Document on workflow completion.

9. A progress monitor tells you when the workflow is complete and

where to find the output file(s). In OmniPage Pro 14 Office, you can have automatic notification sent to an e-mail address.

You can also run workflows from an OmniPage Workflow Starter icon on the Windows taskbar. Click it for a shortcut menu listing your workflows. Select one to run it. OmniPage Pro will be launched if necessary. If it is running with a document loaded, you will be invited to close it first, unless the workflow input is ‘Use current document’.

If you do not see the OmniPage icon, enable it in the General panel of the Options dialog box or choose Start!All Programs!ScanSoft OmniPage Pro 14.0! OmniPage Workflow Starter.

When the Workflow Starter is running in OmniPage Pro 14 Office with the ASR-1600 voice recognition system in operation, you can launch workflows by voice commands. See “Voice recognition” on page 107.

You can launch some workflows from your desktop. Right click on an image file icon or file name for a shortcut menu. Multiple file selection is possible. Choose OmniPage Pro 14.0 and a workflow name from the sub-menu. This sub-menu also provides quick access to five target

Workflows 97

formats using default settings: Word, Excel, PDF, TXT and WordPerfec t. Only workflows with run-time prompting for input files are listed here.

Pressing Stop while a workflow is running pauses it. Click Start to resume processing. If you pause a workflow, maybe do some manual processing, and then save the document as an OmniPage Document, when you later open that OmniPage Document, the interrupted workflow will use the OPD as input and finish the processing.

Workflow Assistant

This allows you to create and modify workflows. It is also used to create and modify Batch Manager jobs; see the next section. The Assistant offers a selection of steps, each represented by an icon. When you choose a step with settings, clicking Next brings up a dialog box allowing you to check and change them. You click Next again to receive a new set of step icons. At any moment in the process, the Assistant offers icons for all steps that are logically possible at that point.

98 Workflows

Creating workflows

Select New Workflow... in the Workflow drop-down list, or from the Process menu. Or click the Workflow Assistant button in the Standard toolbar when no workflow is selected.

The opening Assistant panel offers three starting points.

Choose Fresh Start to begin with no steps in the workflow diagram on the right. Then click Next to choose your first step.

Choose OmniPage Workflows to see a list of existing workflows. These are the four sample workflows plus any you have created. Select one as source. Its steps will appear in the workflow diagram on the right. This is illustrated in the following diagram.

Choose Batch Manager jobs and then select one. Its steps appear in the workflow diagram, but all its timing instructions are ignored.

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The starting point for your workflow will be an existing one.

This lists your workflows. Select one to see its steps in the panel on the right.

Workflow diagram:

The series of steps in your chosen workflow appear here.

When you are satisfied with your choice, click Next.

If you selected a workflow or job as source, you proceed by modifying its steps and settings. See the next section. If you save the workflow to a new name, the changed settings apply to the new workflow only and are not written back to the workflow or job used as the source. Similarly, when you make a new workflow with Fresh Start as source, its panels present settings as they were last set in OmniPage Pro. Any changed settings enter the new workflow, but do not affect the settings in the program.

We now describe the creation of a workflow from a fresh start. Click Next to proceed to the panel where the input is defined:

Choose one input step: Load Image Files: Choose this and click Next to

define file names or request run-time prompting and input settings.

Scan Images: Choose this and click Next to define scanner settings for the workflow.

Open OmniPage Document: Choose this to open a partially processed OPD file that your new workflow should handle. Click Next to name the file.

Use Current Document: Choose this to use a document in OmniPage Pro as input. Be sure OmniPage Pro is running with a suitable document when you start a workflow with this step.

Other input: Depending on your OmniPage Pro version and computing environment, other input sources may be available.

Workflow Assistant 99

After defining the input settings, click Next to choose your second step. The screen looks like this:

Choose your next step: Recognize Images: Send document pages to

OCR with auto-zoning. Zone Images Manually: Choose this to see

document pages before recognition and draw zones on them. Click Next. The recognition step will be offered again.

Apply Zone Template: Click Next to specify the template name. Both manual zoning (in addition to template zones) and recognition will be offered again.

Saving: If you choose a saving step without recognition, you can save only page images.

Finish Workflow: If you choose this now, you will be invited to save images to an OmniPage Document at run-time.

Use Next to move to further steps. Select steps and settings as requested, always using Next to confirm settings and proceed. Use Back to return to earlier steps and modify their settings. If you select a different step, all the steps following it will be deleted. To place multiple saving steps, always use Next. After each saving step is chosen and its settings specified, you still have a full choice of saving icons.

100 Workflows

Finally, select Finish Workflow and click Next. Name the workflow. If you click Finish without providing a name, the workflow is run and the document remains in OmniPage Pro with the name [untitled]. You can consider this a different way of doing automatic processing. If you name the workflow, choose whether the document should remain open or not.

In OmniPage Pro 14 Office you can request e-mail notification of workflow completion to specified recipients. You can also request a barcode cover page for the workflow to be printed or saved to an image file. See “Watched folders” on page 104.

Nuance OMNIPAGE PRO 14, SCANSOFT OMNIPAGE PRO 14 User Manual

Specifications and Main Features

Frequently Asked Questions

User Manual

LEGAL NOTICES

C ONTENTS

Welcome

Using this Guide

Getting online Help

Online HTML Help

Context-Sensitive Help

Tech Notes

Glossary

When to go online

Installation and setup

System requirements

Installing OmniPage Pro

Setting up your scanner with OmniPage Pro

How to start the program

Registering your software

New features in OmniPage Pro 14

Introduction

What is optical character recognition

OmniPage Pro’s OCR capabilities

Documents in OmniPage Pro

Basic processing steps

The OmniPage Desktop

The Menu bar

The Toolbars

The Image Panel

The Text Editor

The OmniPage Toolbox

Managing documents

Thumbnails

Document Manager

Customizing Document Manager columns

Deleting pages from a document

Printing a document

Closing a document

OmniPage Documents

Why save to OPD

How to save to OPD

How to load an OPD

Settings

Processing documents

Quick Start Guide

Loading and recognizing sample image files

Scanning and recognizing a single page

Processing overview

Automatic processing

Stopping and restarting automatic processing

Manual processing

Combined processing

Processing with workflows

Processing from other applications

How to set up Direct OCR

How to use Direct OCR

How to use OmniPage Pro with PaperPort

Processing with the Batch Manager

Defining the source of page images

Input from image files

Input from scanner

Scanning with an ADF

Scanning without an ADF

Describing the layout of the document

Zones and backgrounds

Automatic zoning

Manual zoning

Zone types and properties

Working with zones

Speed zoning

Table grids in the image

Using zone templates

Proofing and editing

The editor display and views

Proofreading OCR results

Verifying text

User dictionaries

Languages

Training