Book People Archive

Re: Page images of books (using a digital camera)

Jeroen,

TypeReader exports (graphically) to tiff (compressed, uncompressed), bmp, and
jpg. It has an option to do all tiff images in one file, or one file per image.

Also, the native .trf file format can be opened with file viewers like ACDSee,
since it's based on raw CCIT4 all-pages-in-one-file tiff.

The two biggest reasons I use it over Omnipage is (1) the control on formatting
when exporting to (doc,wpd,txt,etc) and (2) the way it handles the OCR spell
check itself.

When exporting the OCR'd material, it gives you full control on what to export,
or not, such as italics, font size changes, columns, spacing, etc. When
exporting from Omnipage, you can either do txt with no markup or fully formatted
.doc or .wpd. It adds all kind of font size changes (11.9 to 12.1 point, etc)
making the file huge and a pain to rework. So, I have my output from typereader
limited to only include italics and paragraph indent. This way, I keep minimal
formatting without file bloat.

The way it handles the OCR spell check is to graphically put a copy of the
current line above the OCR'd line, and when you hit tab, it just moves the
cursor to the next questioned word/character. It never pulls your cursor out of
the text, and you aren't fiddling with a dialog box and going back and forth to
fix stuff. This one feature alone saves hours of OCR time.

Overall, I find the accuracy of TypeReader to be equal if not a bit better than
Omnipage. Their tech support is even on the ball. They even emailed me an
updated .dll file when I asked about a TWAIN bug, and they personally reply to
questions; no automaged help systems.

FYI, I usually scan 400dpi b/w duplex on a Fujitsu M3039DG scanner.

Ryan


Jeroen Hellingman wrote:
>
> I just downloaded a demo of TypeReader, so will look at it soon. Does it
> allow me
> to safe the split images again, as TIFF or any other common format?
>
> What are your experiences with the software? I myself use OmniPage Pro 10,
> and have
> been using it for many years. Curiously I found the Macintosh version
> considerably better than
> the windows version, except for the OCR quality itself.