Best OCR for Technical Texts?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday May 8, 2003 @02:14AM from the picking-up-on-the-odd-symbology dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm scanning in user manuals for older lab equipment. I've never used OCR before today, so I installed the Caere Omnipage 9.0 that came with the scanner. I was pretty happy except for a few things. It doesn't seem to want to recognize engineering symbols like the one char +/-,square root, omega, simple equations, it has trouble with super- and subscripts, and it outputs funky Word files. For example, from an 8.5 x 11 original page scanned in at 1 bit at 300 dpi, the output Word file was 10 inches wide, used tons of Omnipage text styles and didn't match the original text's flow. It did do a good job of italicizing headers and recognizing the various sections in a two column page. Googling the news and net just backs up my claims but provides no real solution. A Google search that provides nothing useful looking for best OCR for engineering."

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Clara OCR by aster_ken · 2003-05-08 02:22 · Score: 5, Informative

Have you looked at the open-source Clara OCR? I've used it for some very unique texts in the recent past. It's accuracy is quite good. Besides that, the proofing mechanisms are great!

Go here: http://www.claraocr.org/.

It has very recently been ported to win32, and the community support (via e-mail lists) is excellent.