Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmikel
If you get yourself on the email list for readiris or serif, versions of paid ocr programs are offered at what seem to me reasonable prices.
As has been noted, there are no free alternatives that do 1/10 of what the commercial ones do. This may be because there is real money in doing document conversion, so no one is willing to do for free what customers are willing to pay for. Also support for these programs must be a headache. At best OCR produces a fair number of errors in the output unless the input is perfect and simple. The complaints about this may be a real deterrent to a software author.
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mrmikel:
Not a lot of money. All of the better scan houses I know are being run out of business by the super-cheapie, low-quality places, (which shall remain nameless). Cheap, in this day and age (or better yet,
FREE FREE FREE!!!) is the mantra.
It's a shame, because trust me: we get a LOT of scanned/OCR in here, and the freebs or cheaps really suck. I just had to quote a guy nearly a thou, to clean up and format three books, because HE scanned them (to save Money, of course!!!). Found this "wonderful machine" that just "made my books into Word files." Uh, yeah. Replete with manually-retained running headers and a BAJILLION broken paragraphs. I'm hoping that Tox's ePUBTools will help us survive it. Those books would have been hundreds--not a thou--if we'd gotten Abby-output instead.
The downside of the digital age is manifest; everyone thinks that typing makes them authors; that using Word makes them layout and eBook-conversion experts; that being able to put a PDF into a freebie website to convert into Word makes them Scanning/OCR experts. Oh, and having written 10 reviews on Amazon makes one a qualified Book Editor.
But, bygod, it's
FREE FREE FREE!!!!
Hitch