Scanning in your own books

[kazbates]

I started a thread here in the Workshop forum before I found this thread.

I received a Canon DR-2510 scanner for Christmas that works very well but came with Omnipage's OCR software in a very limited version. The scan turns out great and very few errors turn up in the OCR process. The problem I'm encountering is that if I save the OCRed file in doc or rtf formats, the text is saved inside of textboxes which hinders additional editing within MS Word. My thought was to open the OCRed file in Word to ultimately save it as an html file (my limited version of Omnipage does not allow me to save it as html) as per HarryT's suggestion of format of choice. If I save the file as txt, all formatting is lost. I would prefer to not have to spend $200 to upgrade to Omnipage 16 if at all possible. Any suggestions?

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by ahi

How is ABBYY (What the hell kind of name is that?!) for OCR-ing older books filled with long s characters and other such delights?

Bit of an old post, but I enjoy the adolescent humor of Google Books' OCR's inability to correctly interpret the "s" in sucking pig in older documents.

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by kazbates

I started a thread here in the Workshop forum before I found this thread.

I received a Canon DR-2510 scanner for Christmas that works very well but came with Omnipage's OCR software in a very limited version. The scan turns out great and very few errors turn up in the OCR process. The problem I'm encountering is that if I save the OCRed file in doc or rtf formats, the text is saved inside of textboxes which hinders additional editing within MS Word. My thought was to open the OCRed file in Word to ultimately save it as an html file (my limited version of Omnipage does not allow me to save it as html) as per HarryT's suggestion of format of choice. If I save the file as txt, all formatting is lost. I would prefer to not have to spend $200 to upgrade to Omnipage 16 if at all possible. Any suggestions?

I believe that some other member in this thread tested and found a preference for the ABBYY FineReader 10, both in performance and cost-wise, to the Omnipage 16 upgrade. There is (or was) a great half-price sale going on offering the FineReader UPGRADE for half-price. Didn't your accompanying disk that contained Omnipage also contain the ABBYY Sprite 6 version, from which you could upgrade to the Pro 10? The Pro 10 handles Word to HTML conversion fine (although I myself stick with txt conversion and edit it).

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

I believe that some other member in this thread tested and found a preference for the ABBYY FineReader 10, both in performance and cost-wise, to the Omnipage 16 upgrade. There is (or was) a great half-price sale going on offering the FineReader UPGRADE for half-price. Didn't your accompanying disk that contained Omnipage also contain the ABBYY Sprite 6 version, from which you could upgrade to the Pro 10? The Pro 10 handles Word to HTML conversion fine (although I myself stick with txt conversion and edit it).

When my husband ordered the scanner, he thought it included the ABBYY software but I only saw the Ominpage. I will double check, though.

Is the reason you prefer using txt because of the issue of the textboxes? I'm wondering if this is a common practice of the OCR software and if it would even make a difference if I were to upgrade.

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by kazbates

When my husband ordered the scanner, he thought it included the ABBYY software but I only saw the Ominpage. I will double check, though.

Is the reason you prefer using txt because of the issue of the textboxes? I'm wondering if this is a common practice of the OCR software and if it would even make a difference if I were to upgrade.

In all my ebook scanning experimentation, using Word, WordPerfect and other editing formats and means, I never encountered "text boxes." One thing you might do is to download from the ABBYY site the free trial version of FineReader Pro 10 and see how well that works for you. It is limited in what you can do with it as a trial version (vis a vis the paid-for version) but it should at least resolve your uncertainty regarding the text boxes. Good luck.

[kazbates]

Thanks! I'm definitely going to try the free trial. My husband had also made that same suggestion but I was afraid I would like it too much and want to spend the extra money. I definitely did not get the ABBYY limited version with my scanner.

My husband had also suggested boxing the scanner up and sending it back for another scanner that included the ABBYY software. I would hate to do that as the scanner works well, but it may come to that if I can't get the results I want.

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by kazbates

Thanks! I'm definitely going to try the free trial. My husband had also made that same suggestion but I was afraid I would like it too much and want to spend the extra money. I definitely did not get the ABBYY limited version with my scanner.

My husband had also suggested boxing the scanner up and sending it back for another scanner that included the ABBYY software. I would hate to do that as the scanner works well, but it may come to that if I can't get the results I want.

My scanner is the OpticBook 3600, with which I am very pleased and which receives other favorable comment in this thread. However, I would not jump to returning your scanner if it works well. Just sort out the software problem. When you go into the ABBYY site, see how much they charge for their Sprint 6 version, which has worked very well for me. I only upgraded to the Pro 10 version recently because of their great half-price upgrade offer.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kazbates

Thanks! I'm definitely going to try the free trial. My husband had also made that same suggestion but I was afraid I would like it too much and want to spend the extra money. I definitely did not get the ABBYY limited version with my scanner.

My husband had also suggested boxing the scanner up and sending it back for another scanner that included the ABBYY software. I would hate to do that as the scanner works well, but it may come to that if I can't get the results I want.

Definitely an option....

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

My scanner is the OpticBook 3600, with which I am very pleased and which receives other favorable comment in this thread. However, I would not jump to returning your scanner if it works well. Just sort out the software problem. When you go into the ABBYY site, see how much they charge for their Sprint 6 version, which has worked very well for me. I only upgraded to the Pro 10 version recently because of their great half-price upgrade offer.

I will check into it. I know that David did a lot of research before he chose the scanner he gave me. We wanted to be able to scan in all our old photographs, too, and this one met that criteria as well.

Originally Posted by kennyc

Definitely an option....

Sometimes, you are SO not helpful!!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kazbates

I will check into it. I know that David did a lot of research before he chose the scanner he gave me. We wanted to be able to scan in all our old photographs, too, and this one met that criteria as well.



Sometimes, you are SO not helpful!!

I try.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

In all my ebook scanning experimentation, using Word, WordPerfect and other editing formats and means, I never encountered "text boxes." One thing you might do is to download from the ABBYY site the free trial version of FineReader Pro 10 and see how well that works for you. It is limited in what you can do with it as a trial version (vis a vis the paid-for version) but it should at least resolve your uncertainty regarding the text boxes. Good luck.

I have. IIRC it occurred on pages with mixed text & images. Don't remember what software I was using (it was at least 4 years ago) but I seem to recall disabling 'regions' to get around that. Of course then it didn't import the images (the whole purpose of the regions was to define which areas of the document contained text, and which contained images) but in that case all that was wanted was the text anyway. IIRC we had to do quite a bit of cleanup on the text, probably because without the regions it was trying to OCR the images into the middle of the text.

I think. All I really remember for sure is that the text came out in text boxes that I was able to get rid of by fiddling with the settings, and that the result (post-fiddling) still required a lot of work.

[timofonic]

Hello.

s necroposting legal?

How's FineReader vs Omnipage 16? I see Nuance did it a very bloated app.

The proofreading is very tiresome and still have many issues with tables, unable to recognize an index properly.

Is it me or OCR isn't progressing so much these days?

Someone should make a recaptcha but for users, so people would get into groups and help each other improve tiny amounts of text and formatting

[eschwartz]

On the plus side, 6 years has got to be one of the longest resurrection times.
You *might* have broken a record.


Most people seem to swear by ABBYY Finereader -- still!
I suspect that OCR would progress more if we weren't moving in the direction of less things that need to be OCRed.

[Katsunami]

Woah... old thread. I'm still of the same opinion as I was a few years ago, even more so with lower prices, Kobo codes, and much more availability.

Scanning, OCR-ing and proofreading is way too much work. If a book costs €7. If it even takes only an hour (and it will take MUCH longer), it's not worth it. Would you want to work for €7, gross? I wouldn't, if I can help it.

[harriska2]

Some books are not available in e format. And if you want to use it to highlight and write on it and annotate, e format is the easiest. Some of use refuse to have paper books....