Hi Steve,
Just to add a bit to your message:
OpenBook 9 also uses OCR engins from OmniPage and Fine Reader. OmniPage is
now in version 18 and is quite accessible, a bit cheaper than the
specialized OCR products, but also more complicated for the average user to
get configured so that it will work well with a screen reader. So, if the
user is good at figuring out the options they can make OmniPage quite
usable, but it isn't a task that most people would want to take on.
One exciting thing though about OmniPage is that you can use quite a few
different digital cameras with OmniPage, including recognizing pictures
taken on an iPhone.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Jacobson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: omnipage,
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
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