OCR options

On 2007-07-26 17:32:42 -0500, Chris Brown
<cbrown.RemoveThis@medicine.adelaide.edu.au> said:

> I have a colleague who has a lot of records scanning to do, and OCR is
> required.
> I have used OmniPage over the years and remains the preference.
> However, the price has escalated substantially. The requirement is to
> run on mac. OmniPage Pro X for mac is $1079 AUD ($499 USD).
>
> Any opinions or suggestions on lower cost (or open source; haven't
> found any) alternatives? It doesn't need to handle tables etc. just
> straight character recognition.

Well I can relay a recent experience to you. My grandfather purchased a
scanner last week for his Mac mini running 10.4, and wanted my
assistance setting it up since he's never done OCR before. The scanner
came with OmniPage SE (and it looked to be an older version). OmniPage
refused to work correctly, giving us "File not found" errors and the
like. After messing with it, and re-installing it a few times, we gave
up on it. Luckily, I remembered I had purchased a copy of Readiris Pro
a while back and never used it. We installed that on his computer and
it works great. I feel comfortable recommending Readiris Pro based on
this experience:

<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14235>

--
Apply rot13 to my e-mail address before using it.

JR
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

AES:

> In article <f8b5ls$1mj$1@aioe.org>,
> Chris Brown <cbrown RemoveThis @medicine.adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I have a colleague who has a lot of records scanning to do, and OCR is
>> required.
>> I have used OmniPage over the years and remains the preference. However,
>> the price has escalated substantially. The requirement is to run on mac.
>> OmniPage Pro X for mac is $1079 AUD ($499 USD).

According to the Mac's calculator, at today's rates, $499 USD is $507.52
AUD.
--
Steve = : ^ )
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

Steve Ball:

> AES:
>
>> In article <f8b5ls$1mj$1@aioe.org>,
>> Chris Brown <cbrown.DeleteThis@medicine.adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I have a colleague who has a lot of records scanning to do, and OCR is
>>> required.
>>> I have used OmniPage over the years and remains the preference. However,
>>> the price has escalated substantially. The requirement is to run on mac.
>>> OmniPage Pro X for mac is $1079 AUD ($499 USD).
>
> According to the Mac's calculator, at today's rates, $499 USD is $507.52
> AUD.

Oops, make that $564.03 AUD.
--
Steve = : ^ \
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

On 2007-07-26 18:32:42 -0400, Chris Brown
<cbrown.DeleteThis@medicine.adelaide.edu.au> said:

> Hi All,
>
> I have a colleague who has a lot of records scanning to do, and OCR is
> required.
> I have used OmniPage over the years and remains the preference.
> However, the price has escalated substantially. The requirement is to
> run on mac. OmniPage Pro X for mac is $1079 AUD ($499 USD).
There have been no updates, other than the price, since OSX 10.1 The
system requirements say:
"Mac OS 9.0 or later
Mac OS X (10.1)"

Note they do not say "10.1 or later". This is not an accidental
omission. It requires write access to files it installs in
"Applications" (a big security hole), but its OSX installers doesn't
set the permissions correctly on anything later than OSX 10.1. They
have not fixed this in the last five years. Their support section says
you can work around this by setting the installer to run in Classic (it
doesn't work), or boot into OS 9.2.2 to install (which does work if
your Mac is old enough to do it). Of course if you have an Intel Mac,
that is no help.

I bought a copy before the ridiculous price change (my G4 can boot OS 9
for installing it), but I would not recommend it now. It is
surprisingly good at converting TIFF to plain text, but the RTF output
often had bad formatting. Their support section is very helpful on
this: Fix the output yourself with a text editor.

> Any opinions or suggestions on lower cost (or open source; haven't
> found any) alternatives? It doesn't need to handle tables etc. just
> straight character recognition.

ViewScan <http://www.hamrick.com> does OCR as well as scanning, but
this capability not mentioned on its web-page. They have a free trial
version.
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

Thanks to you all for the information. There are certainly viable
options in what you have suggested.


regards

Chris
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

Steve Ball wrote:
> Steve Ball:
>
>> AES:
>>
>>> In article <f8b5ls$1mj$1@aioe.org>,
>>> Chris Brown <cbrown DeleteThis @medicine.adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi All,
>>>>
>>>> I have a colleague who has a lot of records scanning to do, and OCR is
>>>> required.
>>>> I have used OmniPage over the years and remains the preference. However,
>>>> the price has escalated substantially. The requirement is to run on mac.
>>>> OmniPage Pro X for mac is $1079 AUD ($499 USD).
>> According to the Mac's calculator, at today's rates, $499 USD is $507.52
>> AUD.
>
> Oops, make that $564.03 AUD.



quite, but:

AU site
OmniPage Official AU Site
Australia.Nuance.com
http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoau/omnipage15/ma...p15-mac

and
http://www.nuance.com/omnipage/mac/


regards

Chris
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options 

Chris Brown <cbrown DeleteThis @medicine.adelaide.edu.au> wrote:

> Any opinions or suggestions on lower cost (or open source; haven't found
> any) alternatives? It doesn't need to handle tables etc. just straight
> character recognition.

I would take a careful gander at tesseract (open source, being hosted by
google), which is available through the fink project and is QUITE good.
 >> Stay informed about: OCR options