10 Mar
1999
10 Mar
'99
6:32 p.m.
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
As for prices: my searches show Adobe Acrobat at
$175-$220, depending on
version, and Adobe Acrobat Capture at $550, and - shockingly -
20,000 page "upgrade packs" to extend the functionality of
Capture, at $375. That's right - it's limited and pay-as-you-go.
No, no, no. "Acrobat Capture" is a product aimed at service bureaus to
do bulk conversion.
"Acrobat Exchange" (which will be renamed simply "Acrobat" starting
with
the soon-to-be-released version 4.0) includes a "Capture Module" which
does OCR. You don't have to pay $550, and you don't have to buy refills.
I think the deal with "Acrobat Capture" is that it will directly control
high-end scanners and do thousands of pages in unattended batch mode.
They have deliberately crippled "Acrobat Exchange" to prevent its use
in that manner, buy allowing only page-at-a-time scanning, and by not
importing multi-page TIFF files. I get around that by scanning the
pages in a separate program, using a hacked version of PDFlib/imagepdf
to import the images into a PDF file, and then using Exchange only for the
OCR and Optimization.
What about Adobe Circulate? From the product
description at
<http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/circulate/main.html>, it seems more
appropriate to the task at hand, keeping the digital image as well
as merging the OCR searchable text.
Which is exactly what I've been doing with Exchange. I'll have to read
about Circulate and find out what's different about it.
Eric