Boston Globe article titled "Nuance's OmniPage 17 has scan-to-Kindle feature"

[Gerry]

Yesterdays Boston Globe posted an article on the scanning software OmniPage 17 having a scan to Kindle feature. Here is the link:

http://www.boston.com/business/ticke...unveils_2.html

The article states that "Nuance Communications Inc. may be best known for specializing in speech-recognition technology, but the Burlington company has just unveiled its latest scanning application, which, among many other features, allows users to scan documents and send them to their Amazon Kindle e-readers..."

If you follow the link to the company press release in the article it becomes even more interesting:

http://finance.boston.com/boston/?GU...er&Ticker=NUAN

"By leveraging recent advances in eBook technologies, highlighted by the popularity of the Amazon Kindle 2, OmniPage 17 includes features that maximize the value of ‘electronic paper’ to not only saves trees but also deliver advantages over physical paper. The new release includes support for various eBook and PDF formats, as well as the first-ever “Scan-to-Kindle” feature, with documents automatically re-formatted specifically for easy reading and navigating using the Kindle 2 form-factor. This is an important new feature in light of recent analyst predictions that, in the future, 75 percent of all book sales will be sold in an eBook format. (2) OmniPage also creates the document text needed for using search and the synthesized text-to-speech (TTS) “read-aloud” feature from Nuance that is built into the Kindle 2 and other devices."

[sirbruce]

Yes, I read about this on the Amazon boards recently. Very interesting.

[Sonist]

Curious if it can OCR PDFs better than v16, although if Amazon implements PDF support into the K, it would be better.

[kamm]

What are the differences between K1 format and K2 format?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kamm

What are the differences between K1 format and K2 format?

Nothing at all is different.

[kamm]

Thanks.

BTW was it mentioned here that this Omnipage comes from the same company who's tasked by Author's Guild to license TTS?

Read it: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl.../PersonalTech/

PS: it's also a confirmation of my earlier comment when I said they see it as a threat to audiobooks...

[oncdoc]

anyone buy onmipage 17 and try on kindle?

[Sporadic]

What a shit program.

I tried messing around with OmniPage 17 Professional and it was horrible. Unintuitive, didn't save any of the settings I had so I had to set it every time I scanned a page and the Kindle option...

it's to save the file to .doc? They ripped off Calibre and you can mail it to your Amazon email address for conversion. That's it. The program doesn't actually do anything.

Save your money. If you need an OCR, go with ABBYY.

[kamm]

Originally Posted by Sporadic

What a shit program.

I tried messing around with OmniPage 17 Professional and it was horrible. Unintuitive, didn't save any of the settings I had so I had to set it every time I scanned a page and the Kindle option...

Yeah, right because it's soooo difficult to use when you have to make a whopping TWO CLICKS, huh?

Menus could be better but I can say this about plenty of other apps - these menus are not worse than Apple's unintuitive 'dumbed-down-for-waiters-aka-wannabe-producers' menus or Microsoft's 'utterly-clunky-convoluted-idiotic-illogical-let's-create-10-more-clicks-if-we-can' menus.

it's to save the file to .doc? They ripped off Calibre and you can mail it to your Amazon email address for conversion. That's it. The program doesn't actually do anything.

At least it has a built-in "Kindle Assistant", available right from the Tools top menu - exactly two clicks away.

Yes, all it does is sends your scanned stuff to your kindle email if I understood correctly. Which, of course, can be either @kindle.com or @free.kindle.com, whichever you choose.
What's the ripoff here and what does it have to do with Calibre...?

Save your money. If you need an OCR, go with ABBYY.

Pleahhhhse. Did you even try anything other than stupid English text with its lame, limited character set? Ominpage has its roots in the old Recognita, then-world's best OCR software, let's get real - try using foreign languages, especially with non-Latin character sets and you'll see how it works and THEN (only then) you can trash it if it does not work (I doubt it as 10 years ago Recognita was able to chew 5000 pages of Cyrillic Soviet military documents with surprising results (they were heavyweight technical documents like Mi-8 and Mi-24 warship maintenance manuals etc.)
I'm not saying Abby isn't better (haven't tried current version) but Omnipage is a pretty powerful OCR app too, that's for sure.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by kamm

Yeah, right because it's soooo difficult to use when you have to make a whopping TWO CLICKS, huh?

Pleahhhhse. Did you even try anything other than stupid English text with its lame, limited character set? Ominpage has its roots in the old Recognita, then-world's best OCR software, let's get real - try using foreign languages, especially with non-Latin character sets and you'll see how it works and THEN (only then)

Well, one of the major gripes I had with OP 16 was that you can't specify the input language for a scanned document, especially in the cases where a book contains more than one language, nor does it ask what language the scanned stuff is in at the time of processing.
I don't care about greek/cyrillic scripts, although I remember it having lots and lots of trouble with german Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volumes (German with lots of Greek mixed in).
Similarly, it seemed to make little use of the dictionaries when it was trying to recognize words, with lots of "recognized" OCRed (marked as unsure) text consisting of letter combinations that weren't words at all, apparently because it doesn't always use heuristics for guessing which dictionary word a recognized letter combination should be. (although it does so most of the time, the 'errors' it gives are often just as clearly scanned as the rest of the page)
Abbyy FR 9 is a lot better at this, although its recognition abilities are also far from perfect.

Edit: After trying Omnipage 17, I have to say I'm almost shocked at the mistakes the thing makes.
Firstly, on the first PDF it just crashes, always at more or less the same point (800p JPG book that I like to use as a test)
on a second (GA 70) it mistakes half the german for greek, and generally makes gibberish out of the text (300dpi)
on a third title it cuts the inside 10% off every left page in a dual-page scan with the "look for facing pages" feature enabled. (Rather than looking for facing pages, it just seems to cut every image in half, no matter where the text starts or ends.)
While it's processing you can't edit any of the previous pages,
you can't delete pages from the scan,
you can't remove areas from the recognition thing,
you can't reprocess a page easily after adapting the areas that it needs to process, and
on the OCR proofreading screen it still has the weird button setup where the standard button is always 'ignore' (which it doesn't remember), and the "confirm edit" button is always called "change" with the first suggestion always selected as though it will still change your manual edit to its own suggestion.

In all, I wouldn't use this even if it was free.