Also, there's an Omni.0.1 update (2.7 MB) available. There's an update (226K) on Caere's site that adds support for many more scanners to OmniPage Pro 8. They work much better than the software that came with it. I use the VistaScan 3.5.1 drivers for the UMAX 1200S, even though they're not listed as compatible for my scanner. OmniPage Pro 8 requires a Power Macintosh running system 7.5 or later, 10MB RAM, at least 25MB of available hard disk space, and a compatible scanner. The link was to Digital River for an online purchase, but I chose their option to have the full version with a real-for-true paper manual mailed to my home. Fortunately again, I'd also seen a Deal-Mac posting about an obscure Caere link that offered the full version of OmniPage Pro 8 for just $69 ( still available on Amazon ). It is an option that must be manually selected with earlier system software.įortunately, I'd read a column on OCR somewhere (Why don't I take better notes?) that compared OCR programs available for Macintosh which narrowly gave Caere's OmniPage Pro the nod over Xerox's TextBridge as the best available. Text-to-Speech installs by default with OS 8.5 and later. While I've tried some of the high quality voices such as Bruce and Victoria, Fred still serves our needs best. Fred is just one of the voices available in the Speech control panel installed by Apple's current Text-to-Speech. For those of you who are now wondering if I've lost my.

While Fred isn't really a captivating speaker, he does a pretty good job of pronouncing words and his memory requirement doesn't seem too bad. I wanted editable text so that I could scan the kids' stories from their readers into the Mac, change them to text, and let 'Fred' read to them. With the arrival of a UMAX 1200S (yes, we recycle the included SCSI cards back to the high school's Windows brethren), the need for something more than the bundled limited edition OCR became apparent. It was one of those 'a scanner or nothing' deals. The few times I really needed a scanner I was able to use one in a friend's office. I certainly didn't argue, even though there are probably 50 other things we need with a higher priority. That changed when someone at school thought the PTO really should get me a scanner for classroom use. Since that time, I've switched modem brands more than once and really haven't had much need for an OCR program. Although it crashed my Performa 575 as often as not, it was a marvelous tool when it worked. It was my first taste of the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) software. I still remember how thrilled I was when I finally got the OCR function of my Global Village fax/modem software to work occasionally. That's the position I find myself in with Caere's OmniPage Pro 8. Of course, if you haven't used the product, it seems new to you. A column about a product over 18 months old isn't exactly earth shattering news.

Omnipage pro 18 mac