One of these three panes displayed a reduced view of the whole page, with a dotted rectangle showing me the region I was checking. And I especially liked that FineReader also displayed three other panes. For one thing, I liked the spell-checking dialog's small window showing the text I was checking. I tabbed through the regions, removing the regions I didn't need, and clicked the large "Read Document" button to start OCR.Īfter FineReader performed its OCR, I started the spell-checker, and here's where FineReader proved its worth. After scanning a page, FineReader marked all the regions of the page it thought it could read. I chose Scan, and the dialog I got-which showed me all the options most useful in scanning for OCR-was much easier to manage than the corresponding OmniPage menu. Here's how I used the manual correction features: FineReader's left-hand task pane starts out with two big buttons labeled Scan and Open. Yet when I tested the two programs' manual proofreading and error-correcting features, I found that making corrections was far easier with FineReader than with OmniPage. OCR is an inexact science, and every program produces slightly different results. Neither one was notably superior to the other. In this test of their automated features, I was struck by the fact that FineReader and OmniPage made roughly the same number of mistakes in reading the scanned newspaper text but were tripped up by different words. FineReader seems to have been designed from the start for today's fast computers, whereas OmniPage is weighed down by design decisions that made more sense when computers were slower and programs didn't take time to display some information unless the user insisted on seeing it. But FineReader numbered the text boxes so that I could see whether it had got the sequence of text regions right, while OmniPage made me push a toolbar button before it would display the same numbers. For example, when the programs analyzed a scanned or imported image of a page to decide which parts were text and which pictures, both did an equally good job. OmniPage, by comparison, was able to perform a comparable feat only when I changed an obscure setting deep in its Options dialog so that it extracted text from an image in the PDF file instead of embedding the image itself into the Word file-something that FineReader was smart enough to do without being told.įineReader proved generally more informative than OmniPage about its operations. I first chose to convert a scanned PDF file to Word, and, within seconds, Word popped open with a moderately accurate representation of the fuzzily photographed text from a 1930s newspaper. I began by choosing from a set of built-in QuickTasks that automatically perform operations, such as scanning from a document to Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF, or converting a PDF file to an editable Word file. I found the interface almost ideal in its combination of straightforward clarity for basic tasks and clear explanations of complex tasks. Unlike OmniPage, with its confusing start-up options, FineReader makes a terrific first impression. If you're trying to decide which high-end OCR product to choose, read on and see whether your needs are closer to mine or to those of a corporate IT manager. For those customers, who are more concerned with automation, FineReader gets the job done, but OmniPage does it more efficiently and flexibly. Corporate customers tends to use OCR software to cram stacks of paper documents into digital storage, without taking time to make sure that the software didn't misread a comma as a period. For that purpose, Abbyy FineReader is the almost unquestionable first choice. I use OCR mostly to take scanned copies of old books and fuzzy Xerox copies of old newspaper articles and turn them into editable text, and I spend a lot of time making corrections and changes to the OCR output inside my OCR software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |