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- From: tvp@gibdo.engr.washington.edu (Tad Perry)
- Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.apps
- Subject: WinFax Pro 3.0 OCR Feature, Short Preliminary Review
- Message-ID: <1993Jan09.190412.22717@gibdo.engr.washington.edu>
- Date: 9 Jan 93 19:20:33 GMT
- Article-I.D.: gibdo.1993Jan09.190412.22717
- References: <1993Jan9.183246.4986@newssrv.edvz.univie.ac.at>
- Organization: unaffiliated
- Lines: 33
- NNTP-Posting-Host: gibdo.engr.washington.edu
-
-
- The conclusion first: Assuming you have a one or two time use for OCR
- capabilities that you would like a cheap solution for, it's worth the
- upgrade price of $49 + $10 shipping, especially if you have use of
- some of the other new features of WinFax Pro (like the ability to
- design and edit your own cover pages.)
-
- In my case there were a couple of things I wanted to scan. Basically I
- wanted to fax them to myself, OCR them and then have them online. The
- OCR feature with spell checking turned on, and then one pass with an
- interactive spell-checker, produced text with about 1 mistake per
- 70-character line. That's pretty much in line with the 90-95% accuracy
- claims. And this was on smallish text out of a book, the fax of which
- looked bad. It was obvious that larger text in a sans serif font would
- work really well. One complaint with the spell-checker is that
- sometimes it will spell-check a word into an entirely wrong word
- rather than giving up. This is especially true if the correct one
- isn't in the spell-checking dictionary. Using a better spell-checker
- later may be the way to go, but I haven't looked at it yet.
-
- I was dissapointed with my first attempt at "scanning" in this manner.
- But I got the results I describe above after playing with the OCR
- configuration, the fine and resolution controls on the sending fax,
- and using the "clean image" feature before doing OCR (there may be
- more factors I haven't even found yet). In this way it was possible to
- greatly affect the accuracy of the resulting text file and I was
- fairly happy. I'm pretty sure it can be fine tuned even further
- with a close reading of the documentation.
-
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Tad Perry Internet: tvp@gibdo.engr.washington.edu
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