I have DTPro and am thinking about getting DTOffice. I’m curious why DevonTech seems to recommend the Fujitsu S510 and the Avision. When I say “recommend” I don’t mean that literally; but since I haven’t been able to easily find a list of scanners that support Apple’s Image Capture I’m wondering if there are specific reasons why these two scanners are mentioned.
Also, since the Fujitsu seems to include Adobe Professional 8 (which is overkill for me) I wondering if this inclusion accounts for the price and other Image Capture scanners are just as competent but cost less sans AP8.
If anyone has some other scanner recommendations I’d be very interested in hearing them.
The main reason why we often recommend the ScanSnap is that it is super-easy to set up, there are no driver issues, it is fast, and reliable. With the Avision you need the ExactScan 2 software and with other scanners it is always a question of the driver. We rely on Image Capture here but even Apple does not seem to be able to provide a proper list of compatible devices.
I recently bought the ScanSnap S510M at the suggested of a trusted friend (backed by the threads here) and I must say it’s an extremely well designed product. My reaction to most computer peripherals ranges from this-is-terrible to it’s-so-so. The ScanSnap scanner is a rare bright spot. (I’m unaffiliated with Fujitsu and its agents.) The only drawback is a truly horrific dock icon that sits double-ugly on my computer when the scanner is off.
I have a slightly different scanner question, but it is related to this discussion since I’m debating switching to DTPO from DTP for the OCR and email features. There’s one question that I’m having trouble answering. I’ve managed to import scans from my scanner (a basic HP flatbed scanner) and they OCR and create pretty PDF + text files, but I don’t have a clue how to edit this so that I can correct the OCR errors. Do any of you folks know how to do this? Most of my OCR work involves paper scientific articles so I often run into OCR errors that need correcting.
For years I’ve dreamed of an application that would let me edit the text layer of a searchable PDF to correct OCR recognition errors, without affecting the image layer.
I’m still waiting.
And there’s no such thing as 100% OCR accuracy, either.
Fortunately, reasonably accurate OCR, even with some errors, still makes it possible to search my PDFs. There’s almost always enough redundant word usage in journal articles and other documents that queries are successful,even if some words are dropped or garbled.
In those cases when I want to extract some text from an OCRd PDF, it’s best to create a rich text copy (Data > Convert > to Rich Text) and edit it. Almost all dropped words result in insertion of a double-space, so use Find to search for double-spaces and insert a marker, e.g., spaceFLAGspace to replace them. Click on Replace All, then use the image layer of the PDF as the master for editing. For garbled or not properly recognized words, do a Spell Check, which will identify most such cases.
I’ve been waiting for the same and thought that perhaps, with the recent talk, such a thing might now exist. Ah well!
I’ve been struggling with OCR applications for a while now and am hoping that with the latest DTPO it will at least simplify the silly things like receipts. Baby steps, I suppose.
