ScanSoft OmniPage PRO 12 User manual

LEGAL NOTICES
Copyright © 2002 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 the Netherlands.
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.
IMPORTANT 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.
TRADEMARKS AND CREDITS
ScanSoft, OmniPage, OmniPage Pro, PaperPort, Pagis, True Page and Direct OCR 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.
ScanSoft, Inc.
9 Centennial Drive
Peabody, MA 01960
U.S.A.
ScanSoft Belgium BVBA
Guldensporenpark 32
BE-9820 Merelbeke
Belgium
Part Number 50-281201-00A

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide iii
CONTENTS
WELCOME 7
Using this Guide 8
Getting online Help 9
Online HTML Help 9
Context-Sensitive Help 9
Tech Notes 10
Glossary 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 12 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

iv Contents
The Text Editor 24
The OmniPage Toolbox 25
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
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 the OCR Wizard 43
Processing from other applications 45
How to set up Direct OCR 45
How to use Direct OCR 45
How to use OmniPage Pro with PaperPort 46
Processing with Schedule OCR 47
Defining the source of page images 48
Input from image files 48

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide v
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
Manual zoning 54
Zone types and properties 55
Working with zones 57
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 66
User dictionaries 68
Training 69
Manual training 69
IntelliTrain 70
Training files 71
Text and image editing 72
On-the-fly editing 74
Reading text aloud 75

vi Contents
5SAVING AND EXPORTING 77
Saving original images 78
Saving recognition results 79
Saving a document as you work 80
Selecting a formatting level 81
Selecting advanced saving options 82
Saving to PDF 84
Copying pages to Clipboard 84
Sending pages by mail 85
6TECHNICAL INFORMATION 87
Troubleshooting 88
Solutions to try first 88
Testing OmniPage Pro 89
Increasing memory resources 90
Increasing disk space 90
Text does not get recognized properly 91
Problems with fax recognition 92
System or performance problems during OCR 92
ODMA support 93
Advanced features in Schedule OCR 93
Supported file types 94
File types for opening and saving images 94
File types for saving recognition results 95
Uninstalling the software 96
INDEX 97

OmniPage ProUser’s Guide 7
Welcome
Welcome to OmniPage Pro®, and thank you for using our software! The
following documentationhas been provided to help youget started and
give you anoverview of the program.
ThisUser’sGuide
This guide introduces you to using OmniPage Pro 12. Itincludes
installationand setup instructions, a description ofthe program’s
commands and workingareas, task-oriented instructions, ways to
customize and control processing, and technicalinformation. The guide
is presentedin PDF format, allowing youto usehyperlink jumpson
cross-referencesandother navigation toolsinyourPDFviewer.
Online Help
OmniPage Pro’s online Help containsinformation onfeatures, settings,
and procedures. The online Help is provided as HTML help, andhas
been designed for quick and easy information retrieval. Comprehensive
context-sensitive help aims to provide just enough assistance to letyou
keep working without delay.See“Getting online Help” onpage 9.
ReadmeFile
TheReadmefile containslast-minute information about the software.
Please readit beforeusingOmniPage Pro. Toopen this HTMLfile,
chooseReadme in the OmniPage Pro Installer or afterwards inthe Help
menu.
Scanning and other information
ScanSoft’sweb site at www.scansoft.com providestimelyinformation on
the program. The Scanner Guide contains up-dated information about
supported scanners and related issues; ScanSoft tests the 25 most widely
used scanner models. Access ScanSoft’s web site from the OmniPage Pro
Installer or afterwards from the Help menu.

8Welcome
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 12. 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.
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 User’s Guide 9
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 context-
sensitive 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.

10 Welcome
TechNotes
ScanSoft’sweb site at www.scansoft.comcontainsTechNotes on
commonly reported issues using OmniPage Pro 12. 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.