OCR Software packages?

[poke44]

I am looking for some good ocr software to scan various business and legal documents that will need to be searchable in some way either by actual text or meta/index words. Either pdf or word but both would be best.

I have seen several programs ranging in price from 100 to 6000 dollars but since i have no experience with them and there are a bunch of techies here figure i would ask.

Also great to be back on TRF!

thanks,
Phillip

[jadebox]

I am looking for some good ocr software to scan various business and legal documents that will need to be searchable in some way either by actual text or meta/index words. Either pdf or word but both would be best.

I have seen several programs ranging in price from 100 to 6000 dollars but since i have no experience with them and there are a bunch of techies here figure i would ask.

Also great to be back on TRF!

thanks,
Phillip

It's been a few years, but I used to work on a project for the government where we had to scan hundreds of printed documents and make them into searchable electronic documents.

The best software we found for the job was Adobe Acrobat. It converts documents to PDF format. It does OCR so that the text is searchable. If it's unable to OCR part of the document, it includes that part as an image - so true images as well as handwritten notes, and indecipherable text are included in the PDFs. The resulting PDFs look just like the originals, but are searchable.

We used a separate, non-Adobe, product for cataloging the results. It allowed us to organize the documents, edit meta-data, and search across documents. I'm sorry but I don't recall what that program was called.

-- Roger

[gpoehlein]

I dunno - I just used the software that came with my scanner and it did a pretty good job (took it into Microsoft Word without too many mistakes). I'm using the driver that came with an HP Scanner, BTW.