| This package works extremely smoothly and accurately. The way it is priced is confusing however (more below). FineReader is not only easy to use and accurate, coping with curved lines of text coming from scanned book pages, recognizing tables, fonts and preserving layout of the scanned image, but it also organizes your work, saves images in batches, and keeps track of which image you have proofread, modified and saved. While you're proofreading you can see the part of the image about which there are questions. After the briefest of practice sessions I dove into a 700-page project and it went totally smoothly. The Abbyy website also offers you a fully functional free trial version that you can download. Regarding price, if you have any -- that is any -- OCR software already installed on your computer -- such as came with your scanner, the Abbyy website informs you that you are entitled to the "upgrade" version of this package, which costs only half as much as the "full" version! I had thought that "upgrade" was only useful for those with previous versions of FineReader, but this is not the case. I wonder how many people have paid the extra $...not knowing this fact. |
| I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned thousands of pages each with OmniPage Pro 12 (OP12) and FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also made extensive use of previous versions of both programs. I am happy to have both, because they excel at different things. For my work, however, if I had to choose just one it would have to be FR6. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are. The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. For my purposes, OP12's outstanding feature is the quality of its grayscale and color scans. In fact, I even sometimes use it to produce images for processing by FR6. Generally speaking, the PDF image files produced by OP12 seem to run about 80% smaller than those that FR6 produces for equal text quality -- and better rendition of photos! This is not true for black-and-white (1 bit) files, where FR6 seems to have a slight edge. But when the material calls for image output I usually click on OP12. OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff. It will suddenly crash no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages. Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. When I need fast results or cannot tolerate crashes I use FR6, which is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof. Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up. In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not immune to this, but does it significantly less often. FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed. Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary. Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product. As I say, I don't regret the money I've spent on either of them. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper. If the maker of FR6, ABBYY, would fix their scanning (something I've suggested to them several times) it would clearly be the preferable program. As things are, OP12 fills some needs better. Will O'Neil |
