[blindlaw] Question

[T. Joseph Carter]

Angie,

I found the learning curve of ABBYY FineReader to be fairly high.  
Lots of fiddling to get it to work.  What I've got now has the ABBY 
FineReader engine (currently version 8, since ABBY is skipping 
straight to 10 on the Mac), and it does work extremely well when the 
background is not "noisy".  Most OCR packages try to interpret these 
little artifacts as random punctuation, with even the latest 
FineReader for Windows being no exception.

One interesting thing, if I understand correctly, is that Kurzweil 
can use both the FineReader and OmniPage engines.  I do not know if 
you must toggle them or if it can use both and reconcile the 
differences, but the latter would be a great feature!

I'm not a fan of ReadIRIS.  It's just not clever enough.

Joseph


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:20:09PM -0400, Angie Matney wrote:
>Hi Bill,
>
>Have you used a dedicated OCR package, as opposed to the OCR capabilities
>built into Adobe or something else? I ask because I know that Kurzweil
>contains older versions of the OCR engines in Abbyy and OmniPage. Kurzweil
>and OpenBook contain additional features that will make them better
>solutions for some people. But I personally prefer Abbyy, which is fast and
>incredibly accurate. (I have heard that it is less likely to lock up a
>computer than Kurzweil, but that concerned an earlier version of Kurzweil.)
>I wouldn't necessarily recommend that people who are using OpenBook or
>Kurzweil switch to Abbyy or OmniPage. But if you are in the market for a
>dedicated OCR program, These two packages are very accessible and are very
>good at what they do.
>
>Best,
>
>Angie