Book People Archive

Re: Xerox Textbridge to merge with Omnipage



"Charles P. Hall" wrote:
 
> I just receievd notice from Xerox that Textbridge is being discontinued
> and users are being given a chance to "upgrade" to Caere's Omnipage for
> $90.

> I guess this wouldn't matter too much except the number of big deal
> commercial OCR programs is now down to one... OmniPage.

  TextBridge is, I believe, a product of ScanSoft, which used to be a Xerox
subsidiary (they're still a minority owner, I think).  OmniPage is *also* a
product of ScanSoft, as they acquired Caere, makers of OmniPage, about 18
months ago.  And as Caere had previously acquired their main competitor
Calera (WordScan) a bit before that, all this OCR tecnology is now (theoretically)
in the hands of ScanSoft. 

  But I find nothing at ScanSoft's site about TextBridge being discontinued.
The question is, then, if the offer you received is Xerox-related or if it
is ScanSoft/Textbridge-related?

> There was a thread about some lesser known OCR programs on this list a
> while back, and I examined several of them.

  FineReader from ABBYY is now a very fine product.  I tested their latest
release recently, and it now beats my old favourite Calera WordScan in 
untrained transcription hands down. TextBridge never did, except after very
careful training.

-- 
Anders Thulin     Anders.X.Thulin@[redacted]     040-661 50 63
Telia ProSoft AB, Carlsgatan 6, SE-201 20 Malm, Sweden