Hey there.
I would like to ask for input regarding what commercially available OCR software yields the best results, by which I mean the truest copy of the original paper document which is searchable and editable. I have been told that Nuance Communications OCR is what I should look for. Is that, indeed, the best on the market? I am also wondering how the OCR software to be found in various OCR capable desktop scanners compares against the OCR capability found in Adobe Acrobat pro. Which of them, again, produces the better result of an editable document which is a true copy of the original? i am not sure if Adobe has developed its own, proprietary OCR software, or if it includes in its products OCR software created by someone else. I am looking for as much feedback as I can get on this.
Thanks for any help you have for me,
Mike
I’d say OCR technology has matured to the extent that accuracy isn’t the concern it used to be.
I’m not an expert in this area, (meaning I haven’t tested every method or product available) but really, OCR accuracy and page-layout fidelity are two different functions. Acrobat Pro has come a long way with respect to its capability of export to Word while maintaining the look of the original layout. (That is to say, whether the methods employed to achieve that look in the exported Word document will be the same as those you’d use in creating the document from scratch is far from guaranteed, but this is true of any scan-to-editable path.)