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OCR software review and questions..
Thread poster: sinthome (X)
sinthome (X)
sinthome (X)
German to English
Feb 21, 2008

hi, first post. i found this place while looking for support forums for abbyy finereader pro 9. it had more discussion than anywhere else, so i thought 'hey, why not?' if anyone knows of a *better* forum for abbyy finereader support, please by all means direct me there! otherwise, this is where i am at:

im looking to convert a number of scanned books to either text or searchable pdfs (hidden text behind pdf image). i spent the last few days trying out the three most obvious software... See more
hi, first post. i found this place while looking for support forums for abbyy finereader pro 9. it had more discussion than anywhere else, so i thought 'hey, why not?' if anyone knows of a *better* forum for abbyy finereader support, please by all means direct me there! otherwise, this is where i am at:

im looking to convert a number of scanned books to either text or searchable pdfs (hidden text behind pdf image). i spent the last few days trying out the three most obvious software choices, of which i can briefly review my findings:

1) adobe acrobat pro 8
pros: it creates fairly fast searchable pdf images, without any loss in quality to the original text-image.
cons: ocr engine is the worst of the three, a text-only conversion would be unreadable. and the install size is massive, full of bloat and useless features.

2) omnipage pro 16
pros: nicer interface, really good ocr engine, fairly fast, nice post-ocr editing features.
cons: degrades the original pdf image when you make it searchable (i.e. add hidden text). great for converting to text, but if you want a searchable pdf image, it seriously degrades the image quality, making it a lot harder on the eyes. this deficiency led me to try...

3) abbyy finereader pro 9
pros: very fast. probably even better ocr engine than omnipage.
cons: same degradation of searchable pdf. but maybe *slightly* better.

bottom line: i liked omnipage's interface a little better than abbyy. but abbyy seems a bit faster and marginally better at handling searchable pdfs. the main problem with both is with their poor searchable pdf images. omnipage and abbyy both degrade the image qulaity, while, even though adobe perfectly maintains the image integrity, it uses a less than adequate ocr engine.

my hope is that maybe someone who knows more about OCR software can show me the ropes. maybe there is some trick or hidden feature i am not seeing?? ▲ Collapse
 


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