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