Specifications

Page 3
ROM August — September 2007
ness, so please send any information you
have on that too. Please could you also
include the current Defra advice on set-
aside fields? Can this be done on an e-
commerce basis with virtual fields? Pro-
vided the financial rewards are worthwhile
I am quite prepared to set aside several
thousand hectares of virtual fields in order
to meet departmental and EU Common
Agricultural Policy targets when applied to
set-aside schemes.
In view of the above you will realise that
(Continued from page 2) I will be totally unemployed, and will there-
fore qualify for both unemployment and
housing benefits, however I understand that
unemployment benefits are the responsibility
of another government department and hous-
ing benefit is the responsibility of my local
authority and I will be pursuing these mat-
ters separately with them direct. But you will
understand that claiming unemployment and
housing benefit will be relatively small
change when offset against the gain to the
economy and country’s wealth for not rais-
ing pigs.
Once again congratulations on your appoint-
ment and you should know that if you or your
department should accept me into the ‘not
raising pigs” sector of the farming community,
you can be assured that my wife and I will be
voting for your party at the next general elec-
tion.
I am sir
Yours faithfully [*******]
(Name obscured to protect his identity under
data protection laws).
See you at the September meeting! — Ed.
Nuance’s OmniPage 16 — OCR Software
Your Editor had an opportunity to see the
latest version of Nuance’s OmniPage Pro-
fessional 16 at a recent briefing in London.
It has an impressive range of new fea-
tures and whilst we await the review copy,
read below the Press Release from Nuance.
OmniPage Professional 16
Nuance Unveils OmniPage Professional
16, Making Paper and PDF Conversion
More Valuable to More People than Ever
Before
World’s Best Selling OCR and Document
Conversion Software Delivers Unrivalled
Accuracy, Ease-of-Use and Innovative
Features – Using Your Scanner, MFP and
Digital Camera
London, UK, July 31, 2007 – Nuance
Communications, Inc. a leading provider of
speech and imaging solutions, today intro-
duced OmniPage Professional 16, the new-
est version of the world’s best-selling and
most accurate optical character recognition
(OCR) and document conversion applica-
tion for Microsoft Windows. With the best
document conversion accuracy, break-
through three-dimensional (3D) digital
camera capture technology and amazing
speed advances, OmniPage Professional 16
is the easiest way to edit, share and store
paper, PDF and electronic documents.
Its high accuracy and patented innova-
tions have made OmniPage Professional
the world’s best-selling desktop OCR ap-
plication for years. The new release of Om-
niPage Professional strengthens the heart of
OCR by delivering a 27 percent increase in
document conversion accuracy and speed
increases of up to 46 percent. Better still,
Nuance has integrated its newest technol-
ogy to take advantage of today’s pervasive
dual-core processors to deliver an amazing
97 percent speed improvement when com-
paring OmniPage 15 on a single core sys-
tem – making OmniPage 16 up to 50 per-
cent more accurate and more than 46 per-
cent faster than alternatives.
OmniPage Professional 16 is also the first
desktop OCR application to provide native
support for the new open standard Ecma
Open XML file formats used by the 2007
Microsoft Office system. Further, OmniPage
Professional 16 is the first OCR application
to provide input and export support for the
XML Paper Specification, or XPS, an im-
portant new ‘electronic paper’ format for
scanning, sharing, archiving and indexing
documents for search applications.
“I think we’ve all recognized that paper
documents are not going away anytime soon,
and they continue to create significant busi-
ness and productivity challenges when com-
pared to electronic documents,” said Ralph
Gammon, editor and publisher, Document
Imaging Report. “With OmniPage 16, Nu-
ance shows that OCR and document conver-
sion can be applied in new ways to over-
come these challenges. Increased speed and
accuracy, a simplified user interface, en-
hanced forms capabilities, XPS and Office
2007 support – all of these features cement
Nuance’s status as a leader in the document
capture market. OmniPage continues to offer
real value and time savings benefits to or-
ganizations of all sizes.”
Because of its accuracy and ease of use,
millions have selected OmniPage over alter-
natives to replace manual document conver-
sion with an automated approach, saving
time and overcoming the high costs associ-
ated with traditional paper processes. Or-
ganizations large and small turn to Omni-
Page to automate the paper-to-digital con-
version and archiving of every kind of docu-
ment – including letters, contracts, spread-
sheets, magazine articles, research reports,
technical manuals and more.
“The new release of OmniPage delivers
powerful document capture and conversion
capabilities that are particularly valuable to
users of Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft
Office system and Microsoft Office Share-
Point Server 2007,” said Gray Knowlton,
group product manager for the Office Group
at Microsoft Corp. “Supporting the Ecma
Open XML file formats and XPS will help
users capture and exchange information in
open formats – an important step forward in
enabling interoperability.”
Features and Capabilities
Most compelling in OmniPage 16 are the
features and capabilities that extend the appli-
cations of OCR and document conversion to a
broader set of everyday document tasks. Many
of the enhancements and new features in Om-
niPage 16 are unique innovations not available
in alternative solutions. These include:
Best OCR and Document Conversion
Accuracy – OmniPage Professional 16 is 27
percent more accurate in overall document
conversion than the previous release, with
significant advances in providing “same as
original” conversion to editable formats. In-
stead of relying on text boxes and other visual
tricks to mimic the look of the original, Omni-
Page duplicates the original using the highest-
level features within word processing and
spreadsheet applications. This results in col-
umns, tables, graphics and text that are emi-
nently editable, and makes OmniPage 16 up to
50 percent more accurate than alternatives.
The Fastest Ever – OmniPage Professional
16 avoids the traditional trade-off of accuracy
at the expense of speed. The new release is
both more accurate and faster, delivering up to
46 percent speed improvements for document
conversion. Nuance has implemented addi-
tional improvements that enable even better
performance on Intel and AMD dual-core
processing chips, which have become com-
mon for personal computers from vendors
such as Dell and HP.
Innovative 3D Capture for Digital Cam-
eras – A picture really can be worth a thou-
(Continued on page 4)