9:01AM
PDF Pen Gets Better OCR
PDFPen and PDFPen Pro, my favorite OS X PDF applications, recently updated to incorporate the OmniPage OCR engine. I've been testing it the last few days and there is a noticeable improvement in both accuracy and speed. The justification for paying Adobe a king's ransom for Acrobat just gets smaller and smaller as Smile On My Mac continues to improve PDF Pen.
Reader Comments (4)
Looking forward to that updated OCR script!
David:
You indicate that there is a "noticeable improvement in both accuracy and speed" in the OCR. What does that translate to in absolute terms? Is it actually good and accurate, or did it suck before and now it's just better? Do you have any feel as to how it compares to the competition? Do you use it as your main means of OCR'ing?
Thanks.
Chris
@Chris,
In terms of being faster I sometimes OCR big PDF files like contracts, etc.. Since upgrading it has become minutes faster. I didn't do any benchmark testing but it is noticeable.
In terms of the improved OCR, it is primarily noticeable on bad scans. The old version did fine on clean copies but the new version does better (but not perfect) on poor copies. Garbage in, garbage out.
Hope that helps.
I can't get past the fact that both my demos of this product on Leopard and Snow Leopard has failed due to crashes. All I had to do to crash consistently was to try to change the font sizes in a page. No dice so far.