It has been a few years since my last post and things have changed very much in terms of Japanese OCR support on the Mac.
I have ScanSnap’s iX500 and it comes bundled with the ABBYY’s FineReader (for ScanSnap) OCR engine which INCLUDES JAPANESE OCR AS DEFAULT. AND when I set up DEVONThinkPro Office, the application detected that I was using ScanSnap iX500.
Also, ABBYY’s FineReader also includes in amongst the choice of OCR languages “Japanese” and “Japanese-English” (the mix being that many ‘Japanese’ documents also include English words).
In light of this, I was wondering if you could give an update on DEVONThinkPro Office native support for Japanese OCR?
At the moment, there is no choice to select Japanese in amongst the OCR languages. And this somewhat defeats the purpose of having ScanSnap as a supported scanner when ABBYY provides support for Japanese and Japanese-English itself. What a pain it is to have to OCR everything before adding it to DEVONThink.
I am only posting this because I really want DEVONThink to do well. And now, every where you go in Japan, Apple has deeply penetrated the market. As a mobile computer, the MacBook Air is now most people’s computer of choice here. (Along with the iPhone and iPad).
ABBYY’s FineReader and the OCR engine they license for other developers are two separate products, so you can’t expect them to be feature matched. Well, you can but you’d have to talk to ABBYY about it, not us.
There is a possibility that the upcoming licensed engine will have this support but I can’t comment with authority on it.
I do not quite understand DevonTechnologies’ approach to “support”, but if it requires me having to contact a developer of an engine that DevonTechnologies uses for its flagship software so that I can make use of what I paid for, then that is what I will have to do.
It would have been helpful if you had provided a contact email (and person) to make my job in doing this easier.
And yes, I am very disillusioned with the attitude of support here. I provide a polite enough suggestion and go to the extent of providing the background information. But then get your terse and rebuke-like response.
Rather surprising when you consider that this very software was (or is still?) marketed in Japan in Japanese. I found out about in the software catalogue at my university co-op many years ago.
odazza, Jim’s response was as helpful as we can be at this time.
We license the OCR module from ABBYY and the terms of that license are controlled by ABBYY. Our current license does not include Asian, Hebrew and Arabic languages.
We anticipate an update to the OCR module in the future. We expect at a minimum some added features for OCR.
But we simply cannot at this time comment on the possibility of additional languages, as that depends on ABBYY’s licensing conditions and license fees.
The response seems fair to me. What can they say? If ABBYY doesn’t offer it, and ABBYY is what they are going to use, then we don’t get OCR support for Japanese.
It isn’t a great resolution, because we are still left paying full price for software that doesn’t fully support Japanese, but this kind of stuff happens all the time. I pay full price for Word, but I am still using the same blurry, messed up version I always had on my Mac while my Windows colleagues enjoy a brand new version of it.
Personally, I don’t mind doing OCR for Japanese outside of the app. One trick is to “index” the folder(s) where you keep your PDFs. At night, run Adobe and batch OCR everything in the folder. When you wake up in the morning (depending on how much you have) everything will be done. Because it is indexed in DEVONthink, it will all be there as well.
Ozdazza: You clearly misunderstood Jim’s statement. In no way is he suggesting that you actually contact ABBYY on DT’s behalf. I’m not a native English speaker, but I understand that the phrase “you have to talk to them, not us” merely means that this particular decision was ultimately imposed by the other side.
If you go through this forum, and look carefully, you will get a very good idea about DT’s “approach to support”: It’s excellent. So we should be careful with our rants, just because something is not exactly the way we would like it.
Maybe ABBYY never even offered to licence Japanese OCR to DT: Then this discussion is moot (and Jim’s remark would be spot on).
Maybe ABBYY offered it at a price point that was simply not workable for DT. The full ABBYY FineReader standalone software is already $100, more than the difference between DTP and DTPO, and the latter has additional features added in addition to OCR.
There is another point that is rarely mentioned: DT is a commercial enterprise that can choose to offer a certain product in the way they see fit. We can take it or leave it. Japanese OCR was never in there, it was not taken away from us, so there are no broken promises. We have to respect that they ultimately have the right to choose what to offer and what they leave out. They have to judge whether they financially lose by not cornering the Japanese market.
And we can, and should, request features, but in a polite way.
I thought I would send a post to thank you for adding Japanese as an option for OCR with DT3. Now that the option is added, I have completely made DT3 as a database for my research. I will now be able to confidently recommend DT3 to my colleagues.
Thank you again. It is great to have DT3 as my research assistant!
AND when I set up DEVONThinkPro Office, the application detected that I was using ScanSnap iX500.
