I have a copy of V5, but need to upgrade to V6 as I lost the ability to scan to Acrobat when I upgraded to Mac OS X (Acrobat V5 didn't support the feature under Mac OS X). At the time I was using it, I was using it with an ancient SCSI scanner. As long as you've got drivers for the OS you're running it on, it should just work (I think it uses the TWAIN drivers, IIRC). I really liked it, and I know my Mom loves it for Geneology (except half the time the people on the receiving end can't figure out how to open an Acrobat file!?!?!?!). Zane

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Joe R. wrote: Yes, I use it every day... not to scan (although I sometimes do), but I *do* use it to convert documents of sorts to PDF, and that has been my personal killer app :) --f -- Fred N. van Kempen, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Collector/Archivist Visit the VAXlab Project at http://VAXlab.pdp11.nl/ Visit the Archives at http://www.pdp11.nl/ Email: waltje(a)pdp11.nl BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS / Mountain View, CA, USA

I started answering offline but perhaps someone else is interested too, so here's my answer for the list. paul From: Paul Koning <pkoning(a)equallogic.com> To: rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 09:27:52 -0500 Subject: Re: OCR of 644 TIFF files? Joe> Hi Paul, How much does it cost for Adobe's OCR download and what Joe> versions of Acrobat does it work with? Hi Joe... I was about to answer your query... The OCR in Acrobat is a plugin; I downloaded it off the Adobe website. It plugs into full (not reader-only) Acrobat, which I think costs a bit over $100. I bought version 5; that version is out of date at this point but I don't know which one is current. Another point to watch for: I do not know if Adobe still offers that plugin at no charge. The free version I have is limited to 50 pages at a time -- but you can do larger documents by breaking them up into 50 page chunks and re-merging them, which isn't hard to do with Acrobat. (Drag & drop does it.) There is also a no-limits version of that plugin. But it's obviously aimed at lawyers and the like, people with way too much money. I forgot the price but I think it was over $1000! The other issue with the plugin is that it produces a PDF file as output, which is fine if that's what you want. But a PDF file is NOT really editable, so if the results aren't quite what you want, it's very painful to tweak it. I did it on a 60 page document. Acrobat (full version) lets you edit a PDF file, for example to fix font glitches, but ONLY ONE LINE AT A TIME! A long time ago I used a "light" version of some commercial PC OCR program. I don't remember the name; perhaps I'll think of it later or find it somewhere. Pagesomething... That was ok, more flexible since it produces output that Word can use, and paragraphs actually come across as paragraphs rather than as individual lines. I don't remember how it did with mixed documents -- graphics plus text. The nice thing about the Adobe OCR is that it handles mixed pages well. As for scanning -- some memory says that you can scan in Acrobat. At this point I forgot how I did the original scan of the document I processed. As I said, that was about 60 pages (the original Ethernet spec, as a matter of fact). I may have scanned it page by page in Photoshop, then dragged/dropped the TIF files into Acrobat. Come to think of it, I also did OCR on a significantly larger document: a PDF file of page scans of a flight manual. I had Acrobat export the pages (result: 300 TIF files), ran them through Photoshop for contrast, clipping off crud at the edges, etc., then imported them back into Acrobat into a new document, which I then fed to the OCR machine. I now have the same manual with its text looking somewhat ratty, but fully searchable and much smaller. Ratty, because the OCR doesn't always identify the font correctly, so you tend to have fonts and type sizes mixed in a line when they weren't in the original. paul