[bfollowell]

I am preparing to start my first major scanning/conversion process and am curious what tools most of you use.

From what I've seen and read, Finereader seems to be pretty much the standard for OCR work. Unfortunately, I can't afford $400 for an OCR tool no matter how awesome it is. It seems like I may have a very old version lying around though, possibly v5.

What file format do most of you find gives you the best results for OCR work? I'm sure tifs are great but they can take up a ton of space. jpgs are much smaller but I worry about artifacts causing bad results. I've heard pngs give fairly decent results at a decent size.

Are there any good OCR tools that you can just point to a directory of page scan images and let it work through everything automatically are do you tend to go therough page-by-page?

Finally, do you try scan in such a way that your OCR tool will recognize italics and other speacial formatting or do you pretty much try to capture dumb text and then add the special formatting later?

Thanks for any information or advice any of you may be able to offer.

Sincerely,
- Byron Followell