Shannon, As you may know, Open Book and Kurzweil 1000 are products made especially for the blind. That means, among other things, that they have tailored the user interface to be very accessible and provide keys for many things. Because of the small market, they are expensive. In the case of Kurzweil, they use the OCR "engine" that comes from OmniPage and another that comes from a program called FineReader. While I am not familiar with Open Book, I have found Kurzweil to be a good product.
I have also used OmniPage, though, but have not used the latest version, version 17. It is harder to use than Kurzweil 1000, but I found it to be useable. One feature it has had for a long time is that it can be executed from within Microsoft Word, and this can let one bypass the OmniPage interface more or less. Some versions of OmniPage come with a PDF converter which will recognize the characters in a scanned PDF document without the need of using a "Virtual Printer" to print to a file first and such. It sometimes converts regular PDF's in a way that preserves formatting in a way that is more useful than Adobe Acrobat, especially if one converts to Word. However, it takes a little time to configure and to learn. FineReader is also a less expensive solution as well. There are also a couple of cheaper OCR programs designed for blind persons that are cheaper as well, but I have not used them. I believe that Serotek has one for example that some have said is good. Good luck and I hope this helps. Best regards, Steve Jacobson On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:55:20 -0500, shannon wrote: >Good morning, >I was browsing through the archive and was looking for OCR recommendations. >I found one that mentioned omnipage,, open book and kerswale. >I googled all three and it looks like the last two are pretty expensive and >offer more than I am really looking for. >Here at work we get allot of attachments that people have scanned and then >emailed. >I was wondering how the feelings are for the omnipage. >It sounded like it would do what I want with out the big price tag. >I have some pdfs that I can't use at all and I was also wondering how it might >work if the person had saved the file as one of the picture formats like jpg >or gif, not pdf. >I have already googled OCR on its own but I wanted one that will work with WE >in particular. I am using 7.5.1 on an xp sp 3 machine 32 bit >Any pointers would be appreciated. >Thank you >Shannon >If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. >If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to >GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. >GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage >your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
