NUANCE OMNIPAGE PRO 7 FOR VISIONEER PAPERPORT User manual

OmniPage Pro
for Macintosh
CAERE CORPORATION
100 Cooper Court
Los Gatos, California
95030-3321
European Offices:
Caere GmbH
Innere Wiener Strasse 5
81667 Munich
Germany

ii
Please Note
In order to use this program, you should know how to work in the Macintosh environment. Please
refer to your Macintosh documentation if you have questions about how to use menus, dialog boxes,
scroll bars, and so on.
OmniPage Pro for Macintosh
Version 7
Copyright© 1996 Caere Corporation. All rights reserved. CAERE®, OmniPage®, OmniPage Pro®,
AnyPage, True Page®, Language Analyst®, and 3D OCR® are trademarks of Caere Corporation.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed
as trademarks. Such designations appearing in this manual have been printed in initial caps.

3
Welcome
Welcome to OmniPage Pro, and thank you for buying our software!
The following documentation has been provided to help you learn
about OmniPage Pro.
This Users Manual
This manual provides information on features and procedures. It
includes an introduction to OmniPage Pro, installation and setup
instructions, task-oriented instructions, ways to customize tools,
settings guidelines, and technical information.
OmniPage Pro Guide and OmniPage Pro Tutorial
These provide online information on features and procedures. They use
coach marks to help you find onscreen items quickly. See Getting
Online Help on page 14 for more information.
Release Notes
This contains last-minute information about OmniPage Pro. Please read
this before installing the application.
Scanner Setup Notes
This contains the latest information about supported scanners and
scanner setup.

4
Using This Manual
This manual is written with the assumption that you know how to work
in the Macintosh environment. Please refer to your Macintosh users
manual if you have questions about how to use dialog boxes, menus,
scroll bars, and so on.
The following conventions are used in this manual.
Convention Purpose
Italicized text Emphasizes menu
commands, dialog box
options, labeled buttons, and
file names
For example:
Choose Open... in the File
menu.
Emphasizes new terms the
first time they are used
Emphasizes important words
in a sentence
Command key symbol (a)Illustrates keyboard shortcuts
for certain tasks
For example:
ajmeans press the Command
key and the letter j
Note symbol Introduces a tip or an item of
note
Warning symbol Introduces cautionary text

Introduction to OmniPage Pro - 5
Chapter 1
Introduction to
OmniPage Pro
You probably do most of your business correspondence and other
written projects on your computer. However, certain sources of
information may not be immediately usable on a computer.
For example, if you want to incorporate information from a magazine
article into a document in your word processor, you somehow have to
get the text from the article into your computer. Painstakingly retyping
the article is not an appealing solution.
OmniPage Pro offers a smart solution to increase your work
productivity. OmniPage Pros optical character recognition (OCR)
technology accurately and easily converts scanned paper documents
and image files into editable text for use in your favorite computer
applications. You do not have to retype anything  OmniPage Pro
automatically does it for you.
Please continue reading this chapter for information on these topics:
 What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
 The OmniPage Pro Interface
 Getting Online Help
 Product Support

What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
6 - Introduction to OmniPage Pro
What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of turning an image into
computer-editable text. An image is an electronic picture of text such as
a scanned paper document or an electronic fax file. Images do not have
editable text characters; they have many tiny dots (pixels ) that together
form a picture of text.
During OCR, OmniPage Pro analyzes an image and defines characters
to produce editable text. This is also called recognizing text. After OCR,
you can export the recognized text to a variety of word-processing, page
layout, and spreadsheet applications.
About OmniPage Pro OCR
In addition to text, OmniPage Pro can retain the following elements in a
document during OCR.
Graphics
Photos, logos, and drawings are examples of graphics.
Text formatting
Font types, font sizes, and font styles (such asbold or italic) are examples
of text formatting.
Page formatting
Column structure, paragraph spacing, and placement of graphics are
examples of page formatting.
OmniPage Pro recognizes printed text characters only. However, it can
retain handwritten text, such as a signature, as a graphic element.
The graphics, text formatting, and page formatting elements that
OmniPage Pro retains depend on the settings you select for your
document before OCR. See Chapter 4, OmniPage Pro Settings, for more
information.

What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Introduction to OmniPage Pro - 7
Basic Steps of OmniPage Pro OCR
These are the basic steps of OmniPage Pros OCR process:
1Bring a document image into OmniPage Pro.
You can scan a paper document or load an image file. The
resulting image appears in the Image View.
See Bringing Document Images into OmniPage Pro on page
28 for more information.
2Create zones to identify the parts of the document you want to
recognize as text or retain as graphics.
Zones are borders that enclose the parts of a document image
that will get processed. You can create zones manually,
automatically, or with a template. Any areas not enclosed by
zones are ignored during OCR.
See Creating Zones on a Page on page 31 for more
information.
3Perform OCR to convert text information into editable text
characters.
During OCR, OmniPage Pro defines text characters in an
image. After OCR, you can check for and edit any errors.
See Converting Images to Text on page 40 for more
information.
4Export the document to the desired location.
You can save your document to a specified file format or place
it on the Clipboard.
See Exporting Documents on page 60 for more information.

The OmniPage Pro Interface
8 - Introduction to OmniPage Pro
The OmniPage Pro Interface
The main parts of OmniPage Pros user interface include:
The AutoOCR Toolbar
The Document Window
The Thumbnail Window
Zone Info and Tool Palettes
The Settings Panel
AutoOCR toolbar
Thumbnail
window
Tool Palette
Document Window
Zone Info
palette Image View Text View

The OmniPage Pro Interface
Introduction to OmniPage Pro - 9
The AutoOCR Toolbar
The AutoOCR toolbar contains buttons that can activate each step of the
OCR process. Choose Show Toolbar in the Window menu to open the
AutoOCR toolbar if it is closed.
The AUTO button allows you to activate automatic processing.
The next four buttons  Image, Zone, OCR, and Export  have
various commands that can be set for the operations you want to
perform. You can set commands in the pop-up menus beneath
each button.
The last two buttons  Settings Panel and Check Recognition 
are shortcuts for opening the Settings Panel and checking for
errors in a recognized document.
See Basic Steps of OmniPage Pro OCR on page 26 for more
information on OCR procedures.
Settings Panel
button
Check
Recognition
button
AUTO
button
Image
button
Zone
button
OCR
button
Export
button
The status line reports
the current operation or
the operation you can
do next. Click the small
arrow to show or hide
the status line.

The OmniPage Pro Interface
10 - Introduction to OmniPage Pro
The Document Window
The Document window allows you to view and work with pages in the
current document. Original images are displayed in Image View and
recognized text is displayed in Text View.
Choose Image View in the Window menu (or am) to display a
documents Image View and make it active. Choose Text View in the
Window menu (or aj) to display a documents Text View and make it
active.
You can select options in the Document section of the Settings Panel to
specify how views in the Document window are displayed. See
Document Window Settings on page 81 for more information.
Drag this splitter to the left
or right to resize a view.
Image View Text View