Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!eris!korn From: korn@eris.berkeley.edu (Peter "Arrgh" Korn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Let's Talk OCR Keywords: OCR, Apple, Scanner Message-ID: <5935@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 24 Sep 88 07:33:17 GMT References: <3165@sdsu.UUCP> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Organization: What, me organized??? Lines: 55 Those who have been reading this group for a while and have good memories may recall my postings a while ago (over a year?) on the deplorable quality level in all the OCR software out at the time, as well as the serious reservations I expressed on ReadIt! & it's marketing hype. I said things like "I doubt we'll see any decent OCR software for at least 3-5 years" and such. Well, I went to Seybold last weekend. I saw a product called "OmniPage" demonstrated there. I got my socks blown off. This is one impressive product. The marketroid demonstrated the pre-release version of OmniPage with the Apple Scanner in Line-Art mode (OmniPage doesn't use grey-scale information), and glossy magazines he had on hand. The first demo involved a three-column article with titles in large type (36pt?) and text in smaller type (10pt?). The scanner took about 14 seconds to get the page in, and then immediately OmniPage displayed a rough image of the page on the MacII screen, on which it then drew outlines around all of the text areas (I should mention at this point that the marketroid had 'accidentally' not put the magazine in straight, and the image was maybe 3% of of vertical), and started 'hiliting' the text as it scanned it in. Roughly another 20 seconds later the software was done. From there it can export into MacWrite, Word, etc. For some reason it can preserve boldface & italics into MacWrite, but not any of the other word processors. Maybe that'll be fixed by release (which he said was to be within the next 2 weeks). The second demo involved a table in another magazine. He first scanned the page (~14 seconds), and then drew a box around the table and selected the "spreadsheet/table" option, which, when it scanned just the table, preserved tab information which he then imported into MS-Excel. There were almost no errors - I saw only two: a "0" became "()," and a "%" didn't make it (forgot what it became). There is still much testing that needs to occur before I recommend this product; but there is enough there to warrant investigation! Oh, I should mention that OmniPage will run only on a MacSE or MacII with at least 4 Meg of RAM... The price I was given was $795 retail. OmniPage is published by: Caere Corp. 100 Cooper Court Los Gatos CA 95030 800-535-SCAN Peter -- Peter "Arrgh" Korn korn@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU {decvax,hplabs,sdcsvax,ulysses,usenix}!ucbvax!korn