Book People Archive

OmniPage 11 and Epson scanners

On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 05:08:20PM -0400, 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. For those of you not "in the know", Textbridge is an OCR program in
> th $50-100 dollar range, while Omnipage goes for far more, typically
> several hundred bucks.

ScanSoft used to be a division of Xerox but was split
off and is an independent company now.  It does dominate
the OCR market since it acquired Caere, makers of
Omnipage.

Users of either Omnipage or Textbridge ought to be
able to get an upgrade to the new program, called
OmniPagePro 11, for about $89.  I believe an upgrade
can also be purchased online and downloaded, but the
file is big and if you are like me you would pay
a little extra to have the CD-ROM instead of a big
file that can get lost.

I have tried 11 a bit but am not yet ready to give
a review.  The accuracy seems to be improved for new
pages.  A book with somewhat broken type had many
scanning errors, more than TextBridge Pro 98, my
favorite OCR program.  I am having problems proofing
more than 4 pages at a time.  And em dashes were all
recognized as hyphens instead. Scansoft is working
with me to resolve the problems.

I have also order ABBYY's Finereader and will attempt
to compare the three programs on the same TIFF file
of a big book.  I will time how long it takes to make
corrections rather than count the number of errors.

I recommend ScanSoft's TextBridge Pro 98 as superior
to their later Millennium edition.  They fouled up
the user interface (and I was a beta tester of it who
panned it to no avail).  The quirks, as Charles notes,
are fairly reproducible and so fairly easily fixed,
such as cutting off the terminal . . ."
of a sentence.

Incidentally, I recently upgraded from a SCSI Microtek
scanner to an Epson 1640SU scanner.  It seems to have
the same speed whether on SCSI or USB.  USB is much
more flexible and easier to use, so I would recommend
that now.  The Epson Perfection 1200U or 1240U would 
be a good buy at $199 for those who don't require a 
25-page document feeder or a film scanner accessory.

The Epson TWAIN utility is not quite the same as the
Microtek's that I am used to, for black and white
scans.  But it is probably better for color scans.

The 1640SU takes about 10 seconds a page, about a
third the time of my Microtek E6.

I don't know yet whether Vividata will offer the
OmniPage 11 engine for Linux.  If so, I may go to
that rather than fool with Windoze as I do now to
OCR.  Unless Finereader is as good as others report.
More later.