What is an OCR?

[slackerinabox]

My dad just emailed me (I'm at a friends house) asking me to pick up an OCR program on the way home - what's an OCR program? I called him but he's not home... I'm guessing it's software - can someone recommend a good one? What does it do? Thanks!

 

[Pepsi90919]

optical character recognition.

 

[vi edit]

Optical Character Recognition - scan in a piece of paper, and the software tries to figure out what the text on it is and plugs it into a word processor like Word.

 

[dman]

For a program name, try Omnipage Pro.

 

[KingNothing]

OmniPage Pro works pretty well, but it's kinda pricey. Has a nice training mode though.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Not sure, but some scanners used to come with a thing that does that.

 

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: KingNothing
OmniPage Pro works pretty well, but it's kinda pricey. Has a nice training mode though.

Does anyone know - does omnipage pro have a "hotspot" function that you can tell it to look for text in a specific spot on a scan?

What about some kind of scripting?

What I'd like to be able to do is have omnipage scan in a bunch of documents, grab the numbers from a specific spot on the pages, and then automatically save the documents to disk using the text that it OCR'd as the document name.

 

[KingNothing]

Originally posted by: vi_edit

Originally posted by: KingNothing
OmniPage Pro works pretty well, but it's kinda pricey. Has a nice training mode though.

Does anyone know - does omnipage pro have a "hotspot" function that you can tell it to look for text in a specific spot on a scan?

What about some kind of scripting?

What I'd like to be able to do is have omnipage scan in a bunch of documents, grab the numbers from a specific spot on the pages, and then automatically save the documents to disk using the text that it OCR'd as the document name.

Once you scan in the page you can define different areas on the page for it to recognize differently. Don't know about scripting...maybe see if you can download the manual off OmniPage's site?

 

[slackerinabox]

Thanks guys - I'll pick up omnipage if staples or compusa has it..

 

[TheToOTaLL]

OmniPage sucks balls compared to Abbyy FineReader!! Plus you can actually download and try it out before purchasing.

EDIT: Linkage - http://www.abbyy.com/ocr_products.asp?param=28603