Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
It should be noted that as good as they are, none of these search tools incorporate their own OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functions.
|
Not necessarily true - Windows Search is extensible with 3rd party IFilters
FX :
ABBYY OCR IFilter and that's not the only OCR enabled PDF IFilter. I'm unsure if it's packaged in Fine Reader, can't see why not - apart from marketing.
Recent MS PDF IFilters may have it too, given that OneNote does a rather good job of doing OCR on images.
OCR enabled IFilters will use a lot of processor time when they index an image PDF, but that only happens once per PDF. And Windows Search Indexing is normally set so that it only executes when there's nothing else wanting the CPU - you have to go out of your way to make it otherwise.
OCR enabled IFilters will inherit the well know problems of OCR in general, but not all image PDFs originate from scans of 16th century Blackletter on vellum
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if Spotlight didn't have OCR enabled PDF search.
BR