Optical character recognition software has come a long way since those early days when you were lucky if it read a nice clear scan with about 75 percent accuracy. It would take a couple of minutes to scan a document and the rest of the day correcting the errors, and if the original contained tables or graphics you might as well forget the entire exercise.
Multiple versions down the track and ScanSoft now has a product that can tackle just about any job and is much more than a basic OCR program.

If you are serious about converting paper documents to editable text then this is the way to go. A decade ago it would have cost close to $50,000 for a system that allowed you to rapidly scan multiple paper documents into editable, searchable and archivable electronic documents. Today it can be done for less than $1300 and the cost of a scanner with an automatic document feeder.

Let’s not kid ourselves, OmniPage Pro is not yet perfect –- it still has the occasional problem with words containing double ‘l’s; doesn’t always read ‘rn’ particularly well and has trouble with words on some colour backgrounds.

However, serve it up an unending stream of plain text documents – even blurry faxes – and it will eat them for breakfast, turning them into editable documents with 95 to 100 percent accuracy.

Not only that, it will retain the original layout and embedded graphics, if that is what you want, and if there happens to be text in the graphics it will make that editable too.
There is not even a pressing need to have a scanner because the software will convert PDF files into Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents (although it does not handle Excel 2003 particularly well) retaining the original layout if necessary.

The success of the conversion depends on how much coloured text and coloured backgrounds there are; but, if there is nothing too fancy, it works well and you can correct most of it before you save the final result.

In addition to converting from PDF, OmniPage Pro can also save your documents in PDF format, complete with encryption.

While the interface is clean and appears simple, it does take a bit of getting used to, particularly when dealing with complex documents. However, the end result is usually pleasing and you can even turn text documents into audio books or get the program to read converted text to you out loud.

All up it is an impressive package.