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OCR recommendation?

 
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OCR recommendation? - 9/7/2008 6:26:41 PM   
psaulm119

 

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I would like to purchase scanning/OCR software that can take an image and turn it into .doc or .rtf format, without my having to spend hours fiddling around and deleting all sorts of bizarre characters inside the text. A while ago, Textbridge was good. Is that still the case? I'd like to stay under $100 if I could.

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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/7/2008 7:01:13 PM   
Miss Giggles


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I have no idea, I downloaded Scan to Office trial and it works ok but no OCR software is going to be perfect because of all the different formats and layouts.

You don't need ocr for photos. What are you trying to scan? I tried it for a recipe and it is just a mess. BTW my hp scanner came with some free basic software.
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/7/2008 7:18:49 PM   
psaulm119

 

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I'm trying to scan documents, and OCR will take the image and turn it into editable text. When I said "image" in the first post, I was referring to the digital image that is produced by the scan, not to a photo that I wanted to scan. Sorry for the confusion.

Yeah I'm workign with an HP scanjet also....forget the number offhand. FOr some reason, the OCR isn't working too well tho.

EDIT: my comments above were edited to give the impression that I do have manners.

< Message edited by psaulm119 -- 9/7/2008 7:49:42 PM >


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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/7/2008 9:02:11 PM   
Miss Giggles


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See if there is a trial download for Omnipage, although the reviews on amazon aren't too favorable.
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/7/2008 11:23:22 PM   
psaulm119

 

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Miss Giggles

See if there is a trial download for Omnipage, although the reviews on amazon aren't too favorable.


I'll say. The current version (16) is well above the budget. I looked up the previous version (15) which was barely doable, and even then, it seemed as if at least half of the reviewers had very negative things to say.

Some did like it, tho. Too bad they don't offer d/l of their previous versions (understandable, but regrettable). For $50 it would be fine if I knew it would work.

Thanks for the reference.

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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/8/2008 8:23:48 AM   
Miss Giggles


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Make sure you are not looking at the professional version. the pro version is 449. The regular version is 89.99
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/8/2008 10:35:25 AM   
psaulm119

 

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Miss Giggles

Make sure you are not looking at the professional version. the pro version is 449. The regular version is 89.99


Oh I knew that. I was just checking to see if you knew that too.

Actually, I was looking at the price if you purchase it from Nuance itself, on their own website. Of course I could expect amazon to give a discount.... Unfortunately, they don't seem to offer a trial download of version 16, so I'll have to look at version 15, which is available for 50...

< Message edited by psaulm119 -- 9/8/2008 10:49:13 AM >


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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/9/2008 11:34:13 PM   
InfoCentral

 

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I have an old copy of OmniPage back when I bought my first scanner. B&W and cost me $500 as the color one was $1,000. That was back in the days... I currently has an Epson scanner which came with a suite of programs. The ocr is FineReader and it seems to go a good job.
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/10/2008 2:00:28 AM   
psaulm119

 

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quote:

ORIGINAL: InfoCentral

I have an old copy of OmniPage back when I bought my first scanner. B&W and cost me $500 as the color one was $1,000. That was back in the days... I currently has an Epson scanner which came with a suite of programs. The ocr is FineReader and it seems to go a good job.


Yes the reviewers on amazon really seemed to like ABBYY's Fine Reader OCR, but it costs much more than Omnipage (yeah even on amazon), and we really are not going to use this for anything very technical--its just a matter of being willing to pay a bit of money for software that works... $50 for omnipage 15 seems about right.

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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/10/2008 7:56:35 AM   
Miss Giggles


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I question a lot of those reviews. Some people just don't understand what the software can do or can't do, you know? I get that sometimes at work, they think that software can do everything but in reality it can't or it depends on the person using it.
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/10/2008 10:37:04 AM   
InfoCentral

 

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$50 seems cheap to me for OmniPage. I supprised that things have switched it used to be that OmniPage was much more expensive then FineReader. I don't use ocr too much anymore when I was in college I used it all the time. Saved me a ton of work and time. Now voice recognition has taken its place for me.
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RE: OCR recommendation? - 9/10/2008 11:42:59 AM   
psaulm119

 

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Miss Giggles

I question a lot of those reviews. Some people just don't understand what the software can do or can't do, you know? I get that sometimes at work, they think that software can do everything but in reality it can't or it depends on the person using it.


That very well might be a factor with some of them, but I recall a few IT pros who said they've worked on 20-40 different scanners and installed software on numerous computers saying this was the worst user experience they ever had. They went into detail as to why they didn't like it--they didn't just give it a 1-star rating or whatever.

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