Quote:
Originally Posted by crutledge
This has been my experience. I use adobe Acrobat. Is ABBYY FineReader any better or easier to use?
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Charlie:
To me, those are night and day. Abbyy actually gives you, by and large, what's in the book. It takes some learning, etc., natch, and it's not free. (Although you can use their online, in-browser version for nowt, for...up to X pages, or something. Don't remember). Acrobat outputs utter crap. I can't believe you're using it, it's so bad. When you use Acrobat Pro, it's the iceberg that hit the Titanic. You can see this by copy-pasting almost ANYTHING from a Word file output by Acrobat into the SEARCH window (not the file--the search box) in the Document pane or the regular search box, and you'll see what you're getting in the murks. Make sure you try words like (for example "fiat") or anything that has symbols or characters for punctuation, etc. It's fugly, on a massive scale.
(n.b.: although, having said that, when you look at your HTML, are you getting CLEAN results? I mean, I admit, I'd be gobsmacked if you are, but
if you are....)
I get far, far, FAR better results with Abbyy than Acrobat Pro. They're just not the same thing. Abbyy understands and tries to compensate for that second layer in PDFs, whereas all Acrobat cares about is outputting a Word file that LOOKS like the PDF source--isn't necessarily remotely the same as the PDF source.
STRONGLY recommend Abbyy over Acrobat for this purpose. Acrobat does a lot of things really well, but this isn't one of them, IMHO.
Hitch