• U.S. Government Printing Office puts OmniPage Professional through its paces with 6,000-plus pages per month
• International insulation manufacturer relies on OmniPage to process multilingual documents
• Employment agency finds relief from typing resumés through OmniPage Professional
• What customers are saying about OmniPage Professional

When your job is to cater to Capitol Hill and every federal agency in the United States, you can't afford to make mistakes. Charles F. Jernigan, senior printing specialist for the U.S. Government Printing Office, who takes his work very seriously, understands this concept.

His office is responsible for publishing the Congressional Record and Federal Registrar, along with every report, book, and white paper authored by a federal agency. The Printing Office also is charged with preserving historical manuscripts and books. In such an environment, it’s a challenge just to handle the heavy workload and meet the demand for quality output, much less streamline the pre-press and printing process. Yet Jernigan's group has managed to produce high-quality work and, at the same time, raise the level of the office's efficiency and productivity thanks to OmniPage Professional.

Since 1994, the U.S. Government Printing Office has relied on OmniPage Professional to save employee time and effort and even taxpayers' money, since the office no longer has to pay employees to manually type in text, a time-consuming and tedious task.

Rather than rekeying printed documents, the typographers scan them in -- over 6,000 pages per month -- and then import the text and accompanying images into desktop publishing programs.

Jernigan is particularly impressed with OmniPage Professional's ability to accurately recognize barely legible text and the multitude of typefaces often found in older books and documents (some up to 40 years old). Diverse typefaces and styles within a single document don't stop OmniPage Professional from delivering clear, accurate results. The federal printer has found that the employees can further boost the OCR accuracy rate even higher by customizing OmniPage Professional's OCR dictionary and adjusting the program to recognize special text such as found in dot-matrix printed documents.

"OmniPage Professional's accuracy on poor documents with barely recognizable text is astounding," says Jernigan. "In most cases, the OCR software guessed better than we did."

Challenge: How to create hard copies of multilingual documents available in electronic format for worldwide distribution

Solution: Unifrax Corp., a manufacturer of high temperature insulation products based in Niagara Falls, NY, required an industrial strength OCR solution – not just an accurate and reliable solution, but one powerful enough to recognize foreign languages. As an international company, employees must process documents written in French, German and Spanish in addition to the English versions. OmniPage’s ability to recognize foreign languages, their punctuation marks and accents nicely complements the company’s Systran Translation software. When used together, the two applications have eliminated the need to outsource the work to a translation service, saving hundreds of dollars on the processing of one document alone.

Employees at the R&D's headquarters scan and convert all types of documents, including spreadsheets, lab reports, inter-office memos, patent specifications, and guidelines for modification, republication or distribution. Once the documents are converted, they can then be posted on the company’s Lotus Notes database and made accessible to all employees worldwide.

"OmniPage is very accurate, efficient and speedy," said Sylvia Macey, Assistant to Unifrax's Vice President of Technology. "I love the language feature; I'm taking on projects that previously would have been a long and tedious typing job."

When it became apparent to Tad Resources International that its employees spent most of their day typing in resumés, the temporary employment agency handed down a directive: whenever possible, scan in all printed documents. Three years later, about half of its 300 US-based branches have implemented OmniPage Professional, and rely on it daily to provide leading businesses with professional personnel in IT, light industry and clerical support services.

OmniPage Professional was selected after a formal evaluation of OCR packages by Tad Resources' corporate IT office. Denis Freely, director of information systems, says OmniPage Professional provides the ease of use and slight learning curve important to an organization in which branch offices are fairly autonomous.

"Whenever you're supporting remote businesses, it's important to look for a product that comes with good documentation and requires very little support," explains Freely.

Peggy Haller, an administrative assistant for Tad Resources, finds the OCR software to be a tremendous help in her daily routine at the employment agency. Haller's branch office first installed OmniPage Professional over a year and a half ago to assist its staff of six with resumé data entry and processing. The agency processes 15-20 resumés each day.

Scanning in the resumés speeds up the employee application process as well as the applicant-employer matching process. Using OmniPage Professional, the staff scans in resumés and reformats them in a word processor to meet the firm's standard presentation style before importing them into a centralized database. In some cases, Tad Resources preserves a resumé's original format to allow the hiring manager to get a better feel for the applicant's style and personality.

Once the resumé is entered into the database, Tad employees conduct key word searches to quickly match employers with appropriately skilled applicants. Then it's simply a matter of faxing or e-mailing the resumé directly from the desktop to the client. As a result, the staff is much more efficient and customer service is enhanced.

"OmniPage Professional saves us time, which is money," says Haller. "Time formerly spent typing is now put to better, more productive uses. OmniPage Professional makes my job easier by letting me finish my work faster."

"OmniPage Professional is by far the best OCR software on the market - it's incredible accuracy and ease of use vastly exceeded my expectations, and I have been a loyal user for years! By including a variety of enhancements, such as improved PDF accuracy and layout retention, Nuance has performed the impossible - improved a product that was already superior!"

David Stamps
Web Designer & Developer
DBStamps Consulting Services
Laconia, NH

"I'm pleased with the enhancements found in OmniPage Professional, particularly the voice readback proofing feature and the ability to recognize an Acrobat PDF file and convert it into a Word document in a single step. I'm recommending my organization purchase OmniPage Professional for this feature alone."

Christopher Murphy, MCP PC & Network Specialist
Pierce County, WA - Information Services

"With OmniPage Professional, I spend less time proofing thanks to improved recognition and the AutoCorrect feature. 'Trouble' documents come out clean and professional looking, and PDF ready-only documents can be re-used without rescanning! The addition of PDF file conversion capabilities to OmniPage Professional is Nuance's smartest move yet."

Debra Wyse
Webmaster
EDS
Dallas, Texas