Hi! Had some spare pocket money so thought it about time I purchased Abbey Fine Reader Express from the Mac "App Store" and see what I could make of it.
I've only been playing with the software for an hour or so and the software seems one of those applications that's easy to get into on the surface yet has much to explore beneath. Unfortunately at this time I cannot get Fine Reader Express to talk to my HP 8500APlus multi function device and I'm stuck with this problem for the moment. Perhaps Fine Reader Express doesn't recognise scanning devices connected to a LAN? I looked for a "Preference" pane in the software thinking that perhaps this may help me, I can see the "Preferences" option in the "Fine Reader" menu but the option is greyed out for some reason. Okay, so that initial disappointment over and done with I figured that I could at least do some OCR work on a PDF file and as it happens I needed to convert a PDF to text quickly, still configuring my new Billion Router and a text version of the manual would be of great benefit <smile>. I was somewhat bemused at the time Abbey Fine Reader Express took to run an OCR conversion on the file, tok over an hour to convert a file containing more than 120 pages, perhaps I'm expecting far too much? Well I don't think so really, on my Windows PC K1000 would have taken a third of the time to do the job and of that I'm 100% sure. After the conversion was complete Fine Reader Express prompted me to save the changes, I chose to save the document in RTF format, you can choose to have the document opened I assume by the application associated with the RTF format which in this case was Text Edit. Document was perfectly readable though for some reason the format of the tables wasn't too accurate, not necessarily blaming Fine reader Express for that as text Edit may have decided to do some fiddling itself and that's where a piece of software such as K1000 - which is deliberately designed for the blind user from the ground up - comes into its own, tables and the like are formatted as closely as is possible to mimic the original printed document and you can view tables and document within the K1000 software thus. This isn't a criticism of Fine Reader Express as this software was never intended nor designed with the use of blind people in mind, for those with vision they will find an array of tools to correct formatting, accuracy, spelling and the like from within Fine Reader Express which is perfectly acceptable for the day-to-day business of scanning documents and converting same into electronic text files, Word Processor documents, Spreadsheets, email, searchable PDF documents amongst a host of other formats. Yes, Fine Reader Express is certainly worth the $109.00 Australian I paid for the app, it will take a little time to get going properly however if you're blind, you have a Windows PC, you want very accurate results quickly from your OCR work and you have the money then I'd certainly recommend K1000 over everything I've tried thus far including Fine Reader Express. ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
