--- Forwarded Message from "John Robin ALLEN" <[log in to unmask]> ---

>From: "John Robin ALLEN" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Scanning software
>Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 21:35:28 -0500
>Importance: Normal

A recent query here asked about software for scanning foreign languages. I
have spent several hundreds of dollars and had rather mediocre results with
foreign language scanning using different versions of OmniPage Pro over the
years. It is still slightly better than typing in information by hand or
than using TextBridge, but the results have to be extensively edited. That
process takes almost as much time as retyping the material instead of
scanning.

An example of the problems one faces: no matter what I do I cannot get
OmniPage Pro to recognize that German "und" is not "and", even though I
specify the program is to recognize both German and English. I have no
choice on the matter: it "knows" that "und" is a misprint for "and". There
are hundreds of other similar erroneous decisions it makes.

There is hope. For about US$ 99 (much less than the list price of OmniPage
Pro) one can get FineReader from Abbyy software, and that program produces
almost flawless results working in 53 languages. I have nothing to do with
the company, so my comments are just those of an outsider who tried the
program and found it to work better than anything else on the market.

One does not have to take my word for the quality of the program. One can
download a fully working version of the program and test it out for a period
of about two weeks. It lets users save up to fifty pages scanned, and then
while it can keep on scanning for testing purposes, one cannot save the
results in a word processor.

It comes in a "Standard" and a "Professional" version. The "Standard"
version has all that I need. If persons want to download and check out the
program for themselves, they can get it free at
       http://www.abbyy.com/remote/index.htm
Curiously, neither of the two versions of it will handle Russian, although
the program comes from that country. I would suspect that one could pay more
and get a Russian-speaking version.

                 John Robin Allen
St. John's College
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M5
Canada

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