LEGAL NOTICES ©2001 by 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 the Legal Department at 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. TR A D E M A R K S AND CREDITS ScanSoft, OmniPage, OmniPage Pro, OmniPage Pro X, True Page, Direct OCR and Language Analyst are registered trademarks or trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. Mac and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. in the U.S. and in other countries. All other trademarks and trade names mentioned herein are hereby acknowledged and recognized as property of their respective owners. ScanSoft Inc. 9 Centennial Drive Peabody, MA 01960 U.S.A. ScanSoft Europe BV Randstad 22-139 1316 BW Almere The Netherlands Part Number: 50-941001-00A C ONTENTS W e lc o me Chapter outline Using this Guide How to use online Help Other online resources New features in OmniPage Pro X 7 7 8 8 9 10 1 I n st a l la t io n a n d se t u p System requirements Installing the software Running the program under Mac OS 9 Starting OmniPage Pro Selecting your scanner Registering OmniPage Pro Removing OmniPage Pro 11 12 12 13 14 14 18 18 2 I n tr od u c ti on What is Optical Character Recognition? Beyond OCR Basic steps in the OCR process The OCR Toolbar The full OmniPage Pro interface The Document window The Thumbnail window The Zone Info and Tools palettes The Preferences dialog box 19 20 20 21 22 23 24 24 25 26 OmniPage Pro X User's Guide iii 3 P r o c es s i n g d o c u m e n ts Basic processing steps Automatic processing To prepare for automatic processing To process a new document automatically To process an existing document automatically Manual processing Steps for manual processing Using automatic and manual processing together Using the OCR Assistant Bringing page images into OmniPage Pro Scanning pages Loading image files Opening OmniPage Documents Using drag-and-drop Creating and modifying zones Creating zones automatically Specifying zone types Drawing zones manually Modifying zones Table zones Performing recognition Performing OCR Proofreading OCR results Verifying recognized text Color markers Getting page information Working with documents Resizing a page display Saving a document as you work Moving to other pages Reordering pages Deleting a page Undoing edits Modifying images Modifying text Printing a document 27 28 28 29 30 31 32 32 33 34 36 36 36 38 38 39 40 41 44 46 49 50 50 51 53 54 54 55 55 56 56 56 57 57 57 58 59 iv C o n t en t s Listening to a document Closing a document Quitting OmniPage Pro Exporting documents Saving an OmniPage Document Saving images Saving recognition results Saving to Portable Document Format (PDF) Copying a document to the Clipboard Using drag-and-drop functionality Direct OCR Using Direct OCR 60 60 60 61 61 61 62 64 64 65 66 67 4 S e tt in g s OCR Toolbar options Get Page options Original Layout options Style Set options OCR options Export options Preference settings Scanner settings OCR settings Spelling settings Miscellaneous settings 69 70 70 72 73 75 75 76 76 80 82 85 5 C u s to mi zi n g O C R Specifying the style set Specifying a global style set Creating style sets Applying and editing zone styles Font mapping Zone templates Training OCR User dictionaries Settings files 87 87 90 90 91 94 96 97 101 102 OmniPage Pro X User's Guide v 6 Te c h n i c a l i n fo r m a t io n Troubleshooting Solutions to try first Low memory situations Low disk space situations Improving accuracy Improving fax recognition Interface problems and solutions System failure during OCR Supported languages Supported saving formats Supported image file formats 103 104 104 104 105 105 108 109 109 110 111 112 Index 113 vi C o n t en t s Welcome Welcome to OmniPage Pro X TM, and thank you for buying our software! This User's Guide has been provided to help you get started and give you an overview of the program. Chapter outline Chapter 1, Installation and setup, tells you how to install and start the program and select a scanner. It lists the system requirements and provides guidance on registering the product. Chapter 2, Introduction, explains the OCR process and how it forms part of the OmniPage Pro workflow. It also presents the program's main working areas and controls, starting with the OCR Toolbar. Chapter 3, Processing documents, tells you how to do automatic and manual processing and how to combine them. It details processing steps: acquiring pages, zoning, recognizing, proofing and exporting. Chapter 4, Settings, gives detailed information on each of the choices offered by the pop-up menus in the OCR Toolbar. It also guides you through the choices in the panels of the Preferences dialog box. Chapter 5, Customizing OCR, provides information on some more advanced features, such as style sets and their zone styles, zone templates, training, user dictionaries and settings files. Chapter 6, Technical information, gives troubleshooting advice and details the supported file formats and languages. OmniPage Pro X User's Guide 7 Using this Guide This Guide supposes that you know how to work in the Macintosh® environment. Please refer to your Macintosh help resources if you have questions about how to use dialog boxes, menus, scroll bars, and so on. The following conventions are used in this Guide. Convention Italicized text Purpose · Emphasizes menu commands, dialog box options, button and file names: "Choose Open... in the File menu." · Names sections in this Guide. · Emphasizes new terms the first time they are used. Illustrates keyboard shortcuts. For example: zC means hold the Command key down as you press the letter "c". Introduces a tip or an item of note. Command key symbol (z) Note or Tip How to use online Help OmniPage Pro X has an extensive HTML-based online Help system. Click Help Contents or Help Index in the program's Help menu to open it. The Help system provides you with three tabbed panels: u u Contents: A three-level table of contents. Click a topic. Index: A two-level, alphabetical index. Enter a keyword or scroll to the desired location and click an entry. Search: Search keywords through the whole text of all help topics. It lists all topics containing the specified word(s). u For advice on other Help facilities, please consult the documentation for your HTML viewer. Online help contains some topics not included in this User's Guide: an indexed glossary of terms, settings guidelines for a variety of document types, a Quick Start Guide for reading a sample image file, and documentation on Apple Event support and scripting. 8 Welcome t To get help on buttons and pop-up menus Brief help is available without opening the online Help system. Hover the cursor over any button or pop-up list in the OCR Toolbar or the palettes. A concise description of the control appears in the status line along the base of the OCR Toolbar. t To get help on topics and procedures Select Help Index in OmniPage Pro's Help menu. Begin to type in a keyword you want to find. As you type in the first letters of a keyword, the Help system automatically shows you the first top-level index entry beginning with the letters typed in. OmniPage Pro's structured index helps you to quickly find answers for your questions. Click an index entry to display its related topic. If an entry is linked to more than one topic, a pop-up list appears. Select the desired topic. t To browse through a series of topics Use the Previous and Next buttons top right of each topic. These allow you to view topics in the order they appear in the table of contents. t To view recently viewed pages Use the Back button to retrace your steps to your previously viewed topics. t To print a topic Select the Print button, specify a printer to be used and print settings. Other online resources Readme files, in plain text and PDF formats, are located on the installation CD. They contain last-minute information about OmniPage Pro X. Please read one of them before installing the application. ScanSoft's web site www.scansoft.com includes a Scanner Guide with regularly updated information about supported scanners and related issues. Access the site from the online Help topic Getting Help. How to use online Help 9 New features in OmniPage Pro X The family of OmniPage® products is now augmented by OmniPage Pro X for Macintosh. Here we summarize its most important new features compared to OmniPage Pro 8 for Macintosh. u A better recognition engine has been integrated, capable of delivering greater accuracy, particularly on degraded documents. Support for the Mac® OS X operating system. A revised user interface exploits the improved display techniques of the new system. Support is maintained for Mac OS 9. A new Assistant facility provides interactive step-by-step guidance for users new to the world of OCR processing. Improved parsing of page elements to retain the formatting and layout of the original pages, in particular better retention of color graphics and smarter text/graphics detection. Better auto-detection and handling of tables and spreadsheets. Detection and recognition of reverse text (white or pale letters on black or dark backgrounds). Portable Document Format (PDF) files can be opened and their contents transformed to editable text. Recognized pages can be saved to Portable Document Format (PDF) files, ready for display, use on the Web or for file transfer. Export support added for MS Word 98, 2001 and X and MS Excel 98. Improved export support for HTML (upgraded to HTML 4.0). Voice read-back facility for texts in English and Spanish. u u u u u u u u u u 10 Welcome Chapter 1 Installation and setup This chapter provides information on installing OmniPage Pro X and selecting a scanner to use with it. Please consult the Readme file which provides the most up-to-date information on installing and running the program. Readme is supplied in plain text and PDF formats. These files are copied from the CD to the OmniPage Pro X folder during installation. This User's Guide is also supplied in PDF format. It is copied to the sub-folder User's Guide. The Mac OS X operating system includes a PDF viewer. Under Mac OS 9, please use Adobe Acrobat. The PDF files can be navigated easily using the bookmarks (table of contents), page thumbnails and hyperlinks on cross references and index entries. Please continue reading this chapter for the following information: u u u u u u u System requirements Installing the software Running the program under Mac OS 9 Starting OmniPage Pro Selecting your scanner Registering OmniPage Pro Removing OmniPage Pro OmniPage Pro X User's Guide 11 System requirements The minimum system requirements for OmniPage Pro X are: u iMac, iBook, PowerBook, Power Macintosh or PowerPC compatible computers with at least a G3 processor Mac OS 9.0 or later, Mac OS X (10.1 or above) and QuickTime 4.1 or later (this is normally included in OS X) 128 MB of memory (RAM) on Mac OS X; 64MB on Mac OS 9 with 32 MB allocated to OmniPage Pro (or 64 MB allocated to handle full-page color images with more than 256 colors) 80 to 100 MB of free hard disk space A color monitor with at least 256 colors and 800x600 pixel resolution A Macintosh-compatible pointing device A supported and correctly installed scanner, if you plan to scan documents. u u u u u u Performance and speed will be enhanced if your computer's processor, memory and available disk space exceed minimum requirements. Installing the software t To install OmniPage Pro X: Insert the OmniPage Pro CD in the CD-ROM drive. Double-click OmniPage Pro X Setup. Select a language and then click Continue. This language will be used for installation and also as the program's interface language. Read the license agreement. If you click I Agree, you can continue installation. 12 Installation and setup ...