posted
I don't know offhand, but if you have Acrobat Professional, it will do it. Many scanners come with some (free) OCR software also.
I've done a great wad of OCR stuff over the years, and something prompted me to read up on some software reviews after a few years of getting tired of proofreading & correcting stuff that wasn't OCR-ed properly.
I learned that a program that 'guarantees' an average success or perfection rate of 97-98% which might sound good to someone who hasn't done it, it means 2-3 wrong characters per 100, and that's characters, not words-and an average page can have maybe 12 words per line (say 40 characters) by 25 lines (=1000 charccters)
which translates to about 25 errors per page...not so wonderfully-sounding anymore!
I've tried with Acrobat Pro's built-in OCR and it is hopeless-really bad news!
In the end I went & bought (via Fleabay) ABBYY's FineREADER version 7 about three or four years ago, and it has been wonderful for what I needed it to do well; including accurate pagination & double-column formatting & auto-fixing.
It was 'Miles' better than the free program that came with our old Canon scanner. I was asked to OCR a chapter from a recipe book that the local school is reprinting, so I scanned the pages & as an exercise, used Acrobat to do the work-slow & so many errors it would have been faster to type it manyally. I then tried the old program I had-it was better but still pathetic when you looked at the extra invisible characters it insterted, or the way it might take a dot from an i in one line and take it as a comma from the line above, or replace all lowercase els (Ls) with number 1s.
Anyway what I was getting toward saying is I had trialled a fer different apps, and ABBYY's FineReader was a long long long way better than the rest in leaving me the least amount of fixing to do before we could edit & reformat or do whatever we wanted with it.
FinePrint was so close to precise it was amazing when I finally reloaded it on the PC & used it. The version I bought was all legitimate- but it was a combined English/Russian version of the program, and the manual & packaging was in Russian, but I just installed it as if in UK, and used the password/serial & then went on the net to register which then unlocks other extra attributes and I think allowed exporting to html if you wanted. I think it was about $50 then-but that wasn;t the latest version at the time at all. It was well worth the cost!
[ June 08, 2011, 08:20 AM: Message edited by: Ian Stewart-Koster ]
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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