Caere Corporation announced OmniPage Pro version 7.0 for Macintosh, the latest version of Caere's award-winning optical character recognition (OCR) software for the Macintosh operating system, which provides users with fast, easy, and accurate OCR.

Caere also reduced the price of the OmniPage Pro for Macintosh retail upgrade product to $129(a).

Expected to be available November 25th, OmniPage Pro 7.0 offers users more than a dozen new powerful enhancements for increased OCR productivity. Version 7.0 provides a refined user interface, ease-of-use enhancements, improved integration with word processors, and new tools for improved control over the formatting of output text.

OmniPage Pro 7.0 is available in both retail upgrade and non-upgrade versions. Caere announced today the cost reduction of the retail upgrade version to $129 from $149. The non-upgrade version remains priced at $499(a). The $129 retail upgrade product is available to owners of any Caere OCR product (including all versions of OmniPage or WordScan) purchased by itself or received bundled with most flatbed and edge-fed scanners, including models from Microtek, Hewlett-Packard, and AGFA. The $129 retail upgrade is available at major Macintosh resellers.

Bridging the gap between our paper and digital worlds, optical character recognition is the technology that processes scanned documents and converts them into more useful, computer-editable text that can be used in word processing and other text-based applications. OCR eliminates the need to retype printed paper document such as memos, reports, contracts, correspondence, and resumes.

"OmniPage Pro 7.0 provides many new features and enhancements that translate directly into greater OCR productivity," said Chad Kinzelberg, vice president of marketing. "Version 7.0 builds on the dramatic accuracy improvement that we provided in the previous version. It adds robust capabilities and still maintains the high level of usability that customers have come to expect from OmniPage Pro."

Improved User Interface and New Ease of Use Enhancements

Providing a number of interface and usability enhancements, OmniPage Pro version 7.0 makes OCR easier than before. The ease-of-use enhancements include the following:

 

• humbnail Viewer displays miniature representations of document images open in OmniPage Pro. The Thumbnail Viewer is a window appearing at the left side of the screen that improves the manageability of multipage OCR jobs.
• The Floating Tool Palette and Zone Palette provide easy access to the most common image and zone tools. In addition, the Tool Palette includes a new Eraser Tool that allows users to easily erase stray marks and "noise" on documents prior to text recognition for better accuracy.
• Smart Windows intelligently adjust interface elements based on the user's working environment. Windows are automatically sized to match the user's screen. And the floating tool palettes reposition themselves so that they never sit in the live work area.
• OmniPage Guide(TM) provides interactive, step-by-step on-screen assistance using Apple Guide technology. This interactive technology quickly and easily guides users through commonly asked questions and provides tutorials for users to learn how to use specific features.
• AutoSave allows the user to identify output files names, locations, and formats before beginning the OCR process. OmniPage Pro will then complete the OCR process and save the resulting output text automatically.

Improved Integration with Word Processors

Version 7.0 allows users to take advantage of a wider range of OCR capabilities during Direct Input, the feature that lets users initiate OCR from within most popular word processors and other text-based programs. Not available in previous versions of OmniPage Pro, the following capabilities are now accessible during Direct Input:

 

• Check Recognition allows users to verify the output text before it is placed into the text-based application. Although Check Recognition works much like the spell checkers in word processing applications, it is a more effective way to proofread OCR'd text because it presents the user with an image of the original page along with the questionable output.
• Zoning capabilities allow users to manually select the areas of a scanned page they want to recognize rather than selecting the entire page.
• Users can access essentially all of the capabilities available in OmniPage Pro when used stand alone, including scheduling unattended OCR, training the OCR engine, and copying OCR'd documents to the Clipboard.

Improved Zoning Capabilities

Before converting a scanned page to text, the page must "zoned," a process that identifies and differentiates between text, graphics, and "noise" elements on a scanned page. OmniPage Pro will automatically create zones using the Auto Zone option or allow the user to manually create zones using the Manual Zone setting. Version 7.0 offers increased flexibility during the zoning process and provides the following new features:

 

• OmniPage Pro users now have the ability to edit zones created in Auto Zone mode. Users can easily resize, delete, and move zones which were automatically created by OmniPage Pro with the Auto Zone option. Previously users could not edit these zones and were required to manually re-zone the entire image if changes or corrections were necessary. The new capabilities increase ease of use and save users time by allowing both auto and manual zones to exist on the same page.
• Zoning Tools allow users to draw irregular zones, merge and split zones, make zones overlapping, and identify zones to ignore during OCR. Where previous versions only allowed users to create simple, rectangular zones, OmniPage Pro 7.0 now allows the creation of irregular zones.
• Invert Text option allows OmniPage to recognize reversed out text, where text is white on a dark background. This is a useful feature for users who work with magazine-type pages which often include small amounts of reversed out text.

Expanded Formatting Capabilities

OmniPage Pro version 7.0 provides new and enhanced capabilities for maintaining, defining, and changing the formatting parameters of output text and graphics. OmniPage Pro still offers True Page(R) technology, which preserves the original document's format including text, columns, and graphics within popular word processing applications. This feature is beneficial to users who want to maintain the look of the original page. New formatting capabilities include:

 

• Definable Styles let users create personally defined document styles that can be used for present and future OCR jobs. This allows users to transform their documents regardless of original formatting into a common user-defined look. Users can define any number of styles and style sets within OmniPage Pro to control the format of the output text - including typeface, font size, and margins. OmniPage Pro offers pre-defined style sets for commonly used formats like memos and magazine articles.
• Users can maintain grayscale images in output. Grayscale scanner owners will benefit from greatly improved graphic quality. In previous versions, OmniPage Pro could only save graphics in a black and white format.
• Improved formatting control of output text in the Text Window of OmniPage Pro allows the user to easily change the font and typeface parameters of recognized text within OmniPage Pro so a more finished document can be output to the word processor.
• Improved table and list handling uses new algorithms to better maintain table and list formats than in previous versions.

Scanner users who received any Caere OCR product (including any version of OmniPage or WordScan) bundled with their scanner purchase are eligible for the Retail Upgrade version of OmniPage Pro for Macintosh. The upgrade price of $129 represents more than a $350 reduction in the street price of the non-upgrade version of OmniPage Pro which is expected to be $499.

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