A few years ago, OmniPage was in the doldrums, burdened with an interface that still had traces of its origins in the late 1980s, and built on an OCR engine that couldn't match the power and accuracy of the talented newcomer, our consistent Editor's Choice OCR app, ABBYY FineReader Professional. Well, times have changed, and OmniPage Ultimate, the latest version, is a worthy challenger to FineReader Professional, and a close contender for sharing honors as Editors' Choice. I was surprised and impressed to see the way OmniPage has developed. It still suffers from some ancient and awkward features, and like other apps that have been around for decades (think Microsoft Office) it's cluttered with a mix of creaky older features and sleek new ones. But the sleek new features include some impressively convenient ways of automating OCR tasks, especially in a corporate setting.

Omni-Collection

OmniPage Ultimate combines multiple apps and services, with different interfaces for each. The heart of the package is the OmniPage Ultimate app that actually performs OCR tasks. It's now in version 19, and is the direct heir to the long line of OCR apps that used to be called OmniPage Pro. Next is OmniPage LaunchPad, an app for creating automated workflows that use the OmniPage Ultimate engine to perform OCR tasks and then saves the output; more about OmniPage LaunchPad in a moment. Third is the Nuance Cloud Connector, a cloud-storage service a bit like Microsoft SkyDrive or Apple's iCloud or Adobe Creative Cloud. Fourth is Nuance PDF Create, a simple interface for converting document and other files into PDF format, but not a full WYSIWYG PDF editor like Nuance PDF Converter or Adobe Acrobat Pro.

As in most packages that were put together from apps originally written by different vendors at different times, this collection suffers from a confusingly inconsistent visual style, ranging from the simple and up-to-date Windows 8-style drag-and-drop boxes used in OmniPage Launchpad, to the old-style, high-powered, feature-rich toolbar-and-dropdown interface in the main OmniPage Ultimate OCR app. Fortunately, you'll probably do most of your work in only one of these interfaces, and won't need to sort out the different ways they operate.

Getting Started

OmniPage Launchpad is designed to make things simple. At the top of the window, the app asks "What do you want to do?" Below that are three columns headed "Convert," "To," and "Save." Each column contains large colored boxes that let you choose whether you want to convert (for example) a magazine or a legal document, whether you want to convert it to (for example) Word, WordPerfect, HTML, or Excel, and whether you want to save the result as (for example) a file on disk or on Dropbox, an e-mail attachment, or an item in Evernote. You click on one box from each column to a blank set of boxes on the right to create what the program calls a "Go-flow," meaning an automated task that you can perform with a single click.

At the foot of this interface is another set of boxes that act as toggles that fine-tune the current Go-flow. For example, you can click on a box that toggles between saving the output as a single file including all pages or as separate files for each page. When you're done, you simply double-click on a Go-flow to get the process started. Unfortunately, you can't specify that a Go-flow should always start with (for example) an image imported from a scanner or from an existing file, so when you start a Go-flow you get prompted to choose an input source, which can be frustrating if you expected the LaunchPad to create fully-automated workflows instead of almost fully-automated ones.

Workflow
When you work inside the large-scale OmniPage Ultimate app itself, instead of the LaunchPad, you can create fully automated workflows with a dazzling variety of options, just as you can with ABBYY FineReader Professional. The main difference is that ABBYY lets you add your own workflows to its startup interface, so that you can select a workflow with a single click, while OmniPage Ultimate hides your choice of workflows under a dropdown menu on its toolbar.

It may take you a while to figure out that the same options have different names in OmniPage Launchpad and OmniPage Ultimate. For example, in OmniPage Launchpad you select "Magazine" as the input for the kind of input that OmniPage Ultimate calls "Multiple columns, no table." Also, the "Legal" input option in OmniPage Launchpad corresponds to the option to load a legal dictionary in addition to the standard dictionary in OmniPage Ultimate. I see the point of making these options easy to choose, but it would be good to have some clear indication of how the options in OmniPage Launchpad map to the ones in OmniPage Ultimate.