Russian OCR

[Howard I. Aronson]

Apparently not many SEELANGers have had experience with OCR on the Mac, and
most experiences have been less than ideal. The responses received to my
question on Cyrillic OCR for the Mac were:

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I've had some experience with MacTiger OCR software...

While it was supposedly the best available OCR software capable of
handling Cyrillic, none of us here at Trinity were able to get it working
correctly with anything resembling ease.  So if you are looking for
something user-friendly, you may want to look elsewhere.
Jonathan White <jwhite at mail.trincoll.edu>
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I can't say anything on the topic except this:  don't buy the demo.  It's
only $10 plus $5 S&H, but it doesn't seem to *do* anything.  I am hesitant
to buy the $400 Russian/English version; I don't need the bigger version
because we already own OmniPage 6.0 which is good for Roman alphabet
languages, but doesn't do Cyrillic (we've been trying to convince it, but
to no avail).

Lisa A. Frumkes lfrumkes at wesleyan.edu
--------------------
 I have just ordered MacTiger as part of a research project.  The
demonstration program, which costs about $10, is remarkably unenlightening;
while you can see the image of the scanned page, you cannot judge the accuracy
of the OCR unless you happen to have ParaMac or Dialect.  However, I sent an
image that I had scanned to one of the gentlemen at Russian Language
Specialties
(or something to that effect--I can get you the precise details, if you wish);
he was good enough to subject it to OCR supported by either ParaMac or
Dialect.
I was satisfied with the results, which seemed no worse than optical character
recognition of a printed English text by, say, Omnipage.  There were naturally
some misreadings, but I would estimate that over 95% of the page was
interpreted
accurately.  I rule out the possibility of fraud here, since the image I
submitted was taken from an edition of a medieval text (albeit in the modern
ductus).
    I hope that this information proves to be of some help.  If you like, I can
inform you of further results once I receive the entire OCR package.

Daniel E. Collins  <danielc at HUMANITIES1.COHUMS.OHIO-STATE.EDU>

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I would recommend Smartlink's OCR. Their tel is 1-800-256-4814.

Emil Draitser <edraitse at shiva.hunter.cuny.edu>
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I would very much appreciate any further information or recommendations on
this question. Thanks to all those who replied.

Howie Aronson

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Howard I. Aronson                        hia5 at midway.uchicago.edu
Slavic Langs & Lits, Univ of Chicago     Office: 773-702-7734
1130 East 59th St                        Fax:    773-702-7030
Chicago, IL 60637  USA                   Home:   773-935-7535
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