I’m looking for advice on OCR (optical character recognition) software. I’m considering buying a scanner, and I know sometimes they bundle this software with scanners.
I need a way to get all my typed ramblings into my Mac at some point, and was wondering what your experiences were. I’m just going to buy a pure scanner, not a multifunction machine (you know- print, copy, scan, fax, slice, dice, etc.)
Tell me your stories…….
SEMI-Automatic 
April 17, 2009 at 12:54 am
My cheapie Canon flatbed scanner came with a basic freebie version of Omnipage, which seems to work pretty well. I haven’t used it extensively, but in testing, it works more or less reliably, though not always predictably. For example, it has no trouble with the slightly smeary print of my SCM Galaxie, but doesn’t like the clear open lettering my Olympia SM-9 puts out quite as much. Go figure.
It does try to format the font, and does a lousy job. When I’ve used it, I’ve pasted into a word processor as plain text and added my own formatting.
I do use a PC rather than a Mac. I’d imagine the OCR engine would be the same for both, but I could be wrong.