3 ms·

this looks pretty nice, I wonder how well the OCR works. I would totally use this, but right now I have a hard time justifying actually having a scanner in my

by rtpg 11y ago

this looks pretty nice, I wonder how well the OCR works. I would totally use this, but right now I have a hard time justifying actually having a scanner in my house. I just don't have enough paper coming in (well I do but I throw it away because I know I won't look at it)

gh02t 11y ago
It says they use Tesseract as the OCR engine. My experience using Tesseract in other places has been that it works pretty well and if you tune it a bit it can work very well. It struggles a bit with formatted text like tables or diagrams, but does pretty well with blocks of text. The best (most accurate/flexible) OCR software I have ever used is ABBYY, which works so well I can only infer that it is powered by magic. Unfortunately that magic is proprietary, somewhat expensive (though not so bad really) and Windows only. I used it to help my mother digitize hundreds of pages of salary data for a consulting job she was doing where the text was formatted oddly and even with all that we only had a handful of errors in about 800 pages. It doesn't have the awesome organizational stuff that Paperwork does however, which is what I've really been wanting for a while. This is reminding me of an awesome app I used to use when I had a Mac, which is DEVONthink. Basically a personal document database , Mac only and extremely useful, it was one thing I definitely missed. I use [the excellent, highly recommended for academics] Mendeley to organize PDF journal articles and such, but it's not so great for scans.
- eliaspro 11y ago
  ABBY's OCR engine has been available for Linux since quite some time. http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start
  - gh02t 11y ago
    Really? I haven't tried it, but also a big part of what makes ABBYY work well is its GUI.
nothrabannosir 11y ago
Evernote built this app, Scannable, which, amazingly, works. Unfortunately only iOS.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  And closed-source.

by rtpg 11y ago

gh02t 11y ago

It says they use Tesseract as the OCR engine. My experience using Tesseract in other places has been that it works pretty well and if you tune it a bit it can work very well. It struggles a bit with formatted text like tables or diagrams, but does pretty well with blocks of text. The best (most accurate/flexible) OCR software I have ever used is ABBYY, which works so well I can only infer that it is powered by magic. Unfortunately that magic is proprietary, somewhat expensive (though not so bad really) and Windows only. I used it to help my mother digitize hundreds of pages of salary data for a consulting job she was doing where the text was formatted oddly and even with all that we only had a handful of errors in about 800 pages. It doesn't have the awesome organizational stuff that Paperwork does however, which is what I've really been wanting for a while. This is reminding me of an awesome app I used to use when I had a Mac, which is DEVONthink. Basically a personal document database , Mac only and extremely useful, it was one thing I definitely missed. I use [the excellent, highly recommended for academics] Mendeley to organize PDF journal articles and such, but it's not so great for scans.

eliaspro 11y ago
ABBY's OCR engine has been available for Linux since quite some time. http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start
- gh02t 11y ago
  Really? I haven't tried it, but also a big part of what makes ABBYY work well is its GUI.

nothrabannosir 11y ago

Evernote built this app, Scannable, which, amazingly, works. Unfortunately only iOS.

ekianjo 11y ago
And closed-source.