Review: OmniPage 18 Standard has great OCR and page reconstruction

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) equals Acrobat XI at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. OmniPage, like Acrobat, also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

By default, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a bang-up job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

OmniPage 19 Ultimate is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool.