Which OCR Software??
Praetorius
I am looking to upgrade my OCR software from that which came with my scanner
(Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots of
hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of OmniPage
Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
Any and all responses are welcome. I trust that responses from those with a
financial interest in the product will disclose such.
Thanks in advance.
Frank D
jiva
Lotsa demos and reviews at the url below:
OCR Resource List:
http://www.humboldt1.com/~jiva/ocr/ocr_resource.htm
Please contribute to this resource when you find useful information.
Fred
available for download on the site http://www.irislink.com
Fred
Praetorius wrote in message <7j3lcn$lsn$1...@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net>...
>This seems to be the right ng for this question.
>
>I am looking to upgrade my OCR software from that which came with my
scanner
>(Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots
of
>hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of
OmniPage
>Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
>
>Any and all responses are welcome. I trust that responses from those with a
>financial interest in the product will disclose such.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Frank D
>
>
Roman Zydra
>This seems to be the right ng for this question.
>
>I am looking to upgrade my OCR software from that which came with my scanner
>(Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots of
>hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of OmniPage
>Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
>
>Any and all responses are welcome. I trust that responses from those with a
>financial interest in the product will disclose such.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Frank D
>
>
The definitely best OCR software is Finereader 4.0. It produces
excellent results with docs in poor quality and tables and is very
easy to use.
And the best of all, it's the cheapest ocr software of all.
The Finereader 4.0 Standard edition costs around 85 dollars here in
germany and you can get it in every large bookstore.
Or you can download the Try and Buy version of Finereader 4.0 Pro from
Bye
Anders Thulin
Praetorius <praetor...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>I am looking to upgrade my OCR software from that which came with my scanner
>(Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots of
>hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of OmniPage
>Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
I suspect it depends mainly on how you will work. Are you doing
small jobs, fairly seldom, and are prepared to tweak each single job?
Or will you be doing large jobs, often, and prefer not to tweak too
much?
If large jobs: have you any requirements for streamlining the job?
Say, separating page scanning from actual OCR job? That is:
scan-scan-scan-OCR-OCR-OCR. Or is it just 'press the green button',
and do scan-OCR-scan-OCR-scan-OCR? (Mostly a question of how to spend
your time: in the first case, OCR can usually be done while you do
something else; in the second you have to sit by all the time - unless
you work with a sheet feeder, of course.)
What kind of material? Modern, well-printed stuff? Or old, with
various typefaces and printing quality? Single-language or
multi-language?
Output requirements: do you want full typographical feature
retention or are you content with just plain ASCII as output?
I've been doing fairly large jobs (novels), oldish smallish
typefaces (8-10 points, small x-height, thin serifs), and very varying
paper quality. Plain ASCII for output.
I still swear by Calera Wordscan Plus 4.0 (R.I.P.) -- it takes
some careful adjustment of brightness (the 'automatic' exposure
control is too heavy-handed) but then there's nothing else to do.
Fastest throughput is the scan-scan-scan-OCR-OCR-OCR type of job,
using a separate scanning tool. Only problem is that it can't do page
rotation on the fly (some pages get 'smeared'), so it has to be done
as yet another pass.
I've tried FineReader on some jobs that were impossible to do with
WordScan -- and it did them reasonably well (I was actually surprised
that I could get acceptable results from texts full of chess piece
symbols). But I do not get the same quality on ordinary jobs as I get
with WordScan: there's too much fixup at proof-reading time. (It's
been a year since I checked it last; as always, things may have
changed.) Of course WordScan is no competitor anymore: it was
discontinued after Caere bougth Calera.
Xerox TextBridge Pro 98 is my other OCR tool, mainly because it
handles smaller-sized text better than WordScan does, and also because
it does allow training. Not quite as good as WordScan on standard
stuff, but much better on small-sized text, and just slighly unusual
symbols or typefaces.
Thus my experience is that different tools are required for
different types of jobs.
I would expect Omnipage to do fairly well for 'standard' jobs -- I
haven't tested any of their products since they bought Calera, but
before that my impresson was that they were half a step behind, and
that Calera had the better recognition engine. I have no idea if the
merger went well -- I hope it did, and that Caere now have improved on
all fronts.
If you're going to do OCR fairly regularly, I suspect that you will
end up with more than one OCR program.
--
Anders Thulin Anders....@telia.se 013-23 55 32
Telia ProSoft AB, Teknikringen 6, S-583 30 Linkoping, Sweden
Judith Nicholls
>
> This seems to be the right ng for this question.
>
> (Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots of
> hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of OmniPage
> Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
What are you going to do with it? The different packages have different
strengths.
Judy
Yuli
(cannot download it from http://www.irislink.com). The best still is
Finereader. It beats over software in every feature.
In case somebody was successful in downloading IRIS, please drop me a line
how to do it.
Praetorius <praetor...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:7j3lcn$lsn$1...@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net...
> This seems to be the right ng for this question.
>
> I am looking to upgrade my OCR software from that which came with my
scanner
> (Visioneer PaperPort 6100). I have a 400 MHz Pentium and 128 MB RAM, lots
of
> hard disk space. I want to spend up to U.S.$100. I was thinking of
OmniPage
> Pro 9.0 (I like the compare-original- with-produced-text feature).
>
John W. Sharp
I was using OmniPage Pro 9.0 as OCR software and it was really pretty
horrible. I got FineReader 4.0 Standard and it is simply excellent.
Whatever you do, stay away from OmniPage. It's horribly overpriced and not
very good.
John
Dan
I don't know about FineReader, but I used Xerox TextBridge Pro 98 (English
version with an additional Dutch module) and I was not impressed - to say
the least.
Now I use OmniPage Pro 9.0 and I'm simply delighted!
Dan
John W. Sharp <readan...@voyager.net> wrote in
7k0k98$c...@newsops.execpc.com...
Anders Thulin
I suspect it's an indication that using OCR is not an exact
science. There are simply too many variables involved for 'just press
the big green button' to work perfectly for everyone. Experience with
a particular application is probably a large factor in getting good
results.
One user may think paragraph format is important to retain, and so
won't go on using a package that cannot manage that well. Another
user may use the same package to get pure ASCII, and be completely
satified.
One user may rely on automatical page segmenting; another may do it
by hand.
And one user may work with 300 dpi on text sized just slightly too
small for perfect recognition (say 8 pt); while another uses 300 dpi
on 10 pt without any problems.
And yet another one may use automatic exposure control, while
another sets brightness etc. by hand.
Too much variability involved to make any direct comparisons.
>I don't know about FineReader, but I used Xerox TextBridge Pro 98 (English
>version with an additional Dutch module) and I was not impressed - to say
>the least.
I fed that piece of software (TBP98 + German module) a large part of
chess scores in figurine notation just yesterday: Instead of the 'K'
in a move like Ke1-e2 there's a small king icon, and the same thing
for the other pieces. Annotations were in German language.
I was very surprised to get an almost perfect transcription, after
training the software to translate the 'king icon' to 'K', etc. I had
to use 400 dpi rather than 300dpi, though, and do some careful
adjustment of brightness, as printing was rather uneven in colour on
different pages.
Praetorius
Frank D
hoti...@my-deja.com
Is FineReader 4.0 Pro still very good at this purpose? Or is there a
better OCR software for magazine scanning (graphics+text mixture).
Thanks
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Michael Jon Napier
I have just installed Omnipage Pro 9.0 full version into my system and I
am trying to perform an OCR on a newsletter that I have to edit. When I
export it to Word 97, the charachters are all garbled. Also I was told
that this software would be able to edit text within a logo but it all
seem impossible. Please help! I'm going nuts with this software and the
manual does not help either.
Thanks,
M.J. Napier
Bill
support will not be of much help either.
I upgraded to their version 7 form a limited version which accompanied a
new scanner. I then got suckered into buying version 8. Neither
version recognizes simple punctuation symbols. I sought the help of
their technical support but that was useless. I wrote a detailed letter
to Caere requesting support and they never have even offered the
courtesy of a reply.
My suggestion is to cut your losses. Return the software if possible.
Swallow the loss if it is not and buy some useful product.
There have been excellent suggestion regarding alternatives on this
newsgroup.
Bill Manley