OCR today?

[David Powelstock]

I second Paul's satisfaction with Finereader 7, although my experience with
and OCR in general is not nearly as extensive as his.  I did use Finereader
to scan my entire book ms. (PDF combining English and Russian) into a Word
document for indexing, and it did so brilliantly.  Almost no recognition
errors, and it did a pretty good job of retaining the format.

For a reviews and a comparison of it and OmniPage go here:
http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4540-3523_16-30571456-4.html?tag=tab.

I'm reasonably sure that you can get 30-day trial versions of both programs,
too.

Regards,
David
(Powelstock)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul B. Gallagher
> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 3:20 PM
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] OCR today?
>
> Robin LaPasha wrote:
>
> > Hello, folks. The question returns. I have a library
> colleague with a
> > brand new digital production center and... somebody who
> wants to OCR
> > some Russian (printed) text.
> >
> > The last time I checked (about 9-12 months ago) FineReader
> was still
> > on top, but there were some fans of Readiris. (I gather it would be
> > the choice for Mac-only people...) And, as usual, though
> you wouldn't
> > buy it with Russian in mind, if your shop happened to have full
> > current OmniPage, it was perhaps worth a try.
> >
> > It hasn't been discussed on this list since 2003 (except
> for a recent
> > OCS/Old Greek thread), so...
> >
> > Does anyone have some direct experience with recent revs of these
> > products? (Or other newcomers to the market?) If so, please
> tell us -
> > but do also include:
> >     - the specific rev and level of your product (so we can compare
> > apples and apples),
> >     - whether you're using a Mac or a PC version of the product, and
> >     - whether you have also used the product to OCR other Slavic or
> > non-Slavic languages.
> >
> > ...
>
> I've been using FineReader Pro 7 (Windows) for the past year
> and I'm very pleased with it. The dictionary is much stronger
> than in past versions, and they've added PDF support -- you
> can read a PDF directly without having to take snapshots of
> individual pages. If you start with a good image, you can
> often breeze through page after page with only a question or
> two per page. Crappy images will give any program trouble,
> but I'm consistently amazed at what FR 7 can do when I need a
> magnifying glass.
>
> A sort of downside is still the treatment of tables, but that
> just requires a little skill in using the program. If you
> tell the program to read a page, without any further
> guidance, it will generally recognize and analyze tables as
> such, but too often it will not realize that text in adjacent
> cells belongs to one cell. So when I see a complex table, I
> generally mark that block manually, merging cells to achieve
> the correct structure, before asking it to recognize the
> characters. This optimizes the use of the dictionary when you
> have things like this:
> 	Price	Quan-	Exten-
> 		tity	sion
> (one row, not two)
>
> I generally don't ask the program to do page layout. Even
> though it's quite capable, that's not what an OCR program is
> for, so I just ask it to send me the right words, and I take
> it from there.
>
> Many of my texts include bits and pieces of English, and
> other languages (mostly company names and bibliographic
> citations), and occasionally I use FR 7 for entirely English
> texts. It does fine with these, and has specialized medical
> and legal dictionaries for English, which have really come in handy.
>
>
> --
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
>
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