27 Dec
2008
27 Dec
'08
4:20 p.m.
Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
I bought mine from a dovebid auction for $20 or so
with the adapters,
manual, and printer.
I paid $20 for the unit. It didn't come with anything except a few
cables. I haven't taken it apart to see if there are any adapters, etc.
I did get a 723-4m/qt model.
What OCR program did you use?
ABBYY FineReader 9 and Acrobat 8. FineReader works extremely well in
general. You need a fast machine (luckily my quad core 2.8ghz w/ 8 gigs
of ram qualifies, brag brag) and plenty of patience. Even a good OCR
package needs hand-holding to identify non-ocr picture areas vs text
areas. And then the software detects OCR errors, which need to be
checked one by one -- 95% are false positives.
You know that Acrobat 8 supports its own OCR. Which is good, easy, and
fast. But it can't (easily) recreate an entire document like FR9. It
makes too many mistakes, doesn't have a complete enough interface for
fixing problems. It's nice to take an existing PDF and quickly add a
search capability to it -- but you wouldn't want to try what I did using it.
Your OCR
of the files makes the scanner much more usable.
No doubt. That's why I didn't mind spending the time. The real point
is that OCR isn't automatic. The automatic routines get you to maybe
85% or 90% -- you need a fair bit of work to get to or close to 100%.
Since google indexes the contents of searchable PDFs, I hope that this
OCR copy makes it out there for people to find.
Thanks
Bob
Keith