Book People Archive

Re: FineReader OCR

In a message dated 3/26/2001 dean@[redacted] writes:


> Seems like a pretty impressive difference to me. If anyone else has used
> FineReader - or compared it to other OCR systems - I'd love to hear
> about your experiences.
> 
> 

Thank you for bringing this to our attention! I took a look at FineReader 4 
last November and dismissed it with the notation, "not as fine as they 
think." But FineReader 5 (22 megs download) is, to use a word I rarely apply 
to software, excellent. For years I've wished for a program that combines 
ease of editing with accuracy-optimized routines, rather than 
speed-optimized. It looks like AABBY has finally produced one. FineReader is 
VERY slow, compared to EVERY other OCR program I have ever tried. But it will 
work while I play so what do I care? And what it pays in slowness it appears 
to buy back in accuracy. 

And here's the most important part, for me: When recognition is done, you get 
an easy-to-use, interactive editor with full scan visible and zoom on suspect 
zones to quickly check the work--or to carefully proofread it. My only 
complaints so far are small: you can't switch from insert mode to overwrite, 
and there's no way to "tab" to the next flagged error.

If it performs through the trial period as well as it has today, FineReader 
will supplant Cuneiform as The Naked Word's OCR tool of choice.

Jim Weiler
The Naked Word