OCR Software

[Bill Martin]

My generic OCR software works well on mundane things, but it gets crazed
trying to scan complex tables from the newspaper. Tables where they've
jammed everything in tightly with tiny type and perhaps vertical rule lines
to divide the columns. Financial tables from the newspaper for example. It
takes way too much time manually editing it into proper columns.

Can anyone recommend some third party OCR software that does this
successfully?

Thanks...

Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)

[Ragnar Olsen]

Abbyy FineReader 6.0 does a great job for me. Complex tables may be a
bit tricky, but by zooming and drawing lines, it's ok.
Ragnar

Post by Bill Martin
My generic OCR software works well on mundane things, but it gets crazed
trying to scan complex tables from the newspaper. Tables where they've
jammed everything in tightly with tiny type and perhaps vertical rule lines
to divide the columns. Financial tables from the newspaper for example. It
takes way too much time manually editing it into proper columns.
Can anyone recommend some third party OCR software that does this
successfully?
Thanks...
Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)

[Waldo]

Post by Ragnar Olsen
Abbyy FineReader 6.0 does a great job for me. Complex tables may be a
bit tricky, but by zooming and drawing lines, it's ok.
Ragnar

Try version 7...

Waldo

[Capt Ravikumar R Manian]

Hi Bill,
I am freelancer and can take this work up for you, for a fee, on a daily
basis. If interested please mail me at ravikumar AT vsnl DOT com.
Rgds
Ravi

Post by Waldo

Post by Ragnar Olsen
Abbyy FineReader 6.0 does a great job for me. Complex tables may be a
bit tricky, but by zooming and drawing lines, it's ok.
Ragnar

Try version 7...
Waldo

[Bill Martin]

Thanks for your suggestions. I downloaded the Abbyy software and tried it on
a well scanned financial table. I found that the "Abbyy Scan To Office"
software was perhaps very maginally better than what came free with my
scanner. The "Abbyy FineReader" was much better, but...

Even FineReader wouldn't produce a TXT document that I could import into a
spreadsheet and work with. Several numbers on a line would be crunched
together as one number and so forth. Basically the OCR part works well, but
it's somewhat confused as to where spaces are on the line.

With some manual tweaking and telling it where column boundries are and
playing around I could tease an OCR conversion out of it which was good
enough that I could probably write my own software to post process it
further, infer what should have been generated given the known structure of
the data, and generate a usable TXT conversion from it.

For the moment I think I'm going to continue to keep searching a bit before I
resort to writing software.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)

[Bill Martin]

Reset... After playing with FineReader more extensively, and with it's
various tables functions, I find it can be convinced to produce exactly what
I want. It takes a good 15 minutes to set it up each time, but perhaps I can
work that down some too.

Was version 6 of FineReader significantly poorer than the current version 7?
I find it can be had for about 10% of the price of the new version.

Thanks all...

Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)

[Clarence Klopfstein]

Bill,
My company sells some OCR software (TypeReader Pro), it is pretty good, we
just ran some test on it and it was better then all the rest.

You can send us a sample tiff image and we would be happy to run it through
and show you the results, we can give you a text document or an Excel
document.

***@scanhelp.com
--
Thanks,

Clarence Klopfstein
PH: 513-528-6660
Fax: [phone]

Post by Bill Martin
Reset... After playing with FineReader more extensively, and with it's
various tables functions, I find it can be convinced to produce exactly what
I want. It takes a good 15 minutes to set it up each time, but perhaps I can
work that down some too.
Was version 6 of FineReader significantly poorer than the current version 7?
I find it can be had for about 10% of the price of the new version.
Thanks all...
Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)

[Bill Martin]

Post by Clarence Klopfstein
You can send us a sample tiff image and we would be happy to run it through
and show you the results, we can give you a text document or an Excel
document.

Thanks for the offer, but I really have to do the OCR hands on myself to
understand how well the program works, etc. Whether I could live with it's
particular quirks or not. If I get some time again though, I'll download the
trial version an play with it a bit.

Thanks...

Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)