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I did this over 5 years ago (Fujitsu fi-5110EOX w/Acrobat 6.0 Standard running on WinXP). It been a complete success, but we've also been a victim of it's succ

by cagey 16y ago

I did this over 5 years ago (Fujitsu fi-5110EOX w/Acrobat 6.0 Standard running on WinXP). It been a complete success, but we've also been a victim of it's success: I read about all the cool new features of the newer Scansnaps and am very jealous (chiefly because either automatic OCR + indexing isn't part of the setup we have, or I'm too dumb to have figured out how to enable it). This one feature is ALMOST enough to get me to buy a new Scansnap, but (a) the old one works just as good as it ever did, and our "filing system", such as it is, is "good enough" (to let us retrieve needed docs), and (b) new or old, these devices aren't cheap (and I'm not clear how much benefit automatic OCR + indexing would be). Anyway, it seems it should be a software only feature; if only I could use the old scanner with newer software... but I investigated a year ago and my scanner is in the "obsolete" category as far as the vendor is concerned (sigh; is there any open source software that can interface to any of the Scansnap scanners?). Also when I read the swooning reviews of the new Scansnaps, it seems the platform is usually Mac, which I have no plans to move to (are all the coolest features also present on the Windows version?). And yes, shredders have been far less reliable than the scanner: we must have gone thru at least 4 so far...

lazyjeff 16y ago
If you already have PDFs, isn't OCR simply a PDF --> PDF+metadata conversion? Why wouldn't some open source OCR software work, where you feed it your old PDFs and it outputs OCRed PDFs. Is this some kind of tactic for scanner manufacturers to sell newer versions of scanner or am I understanding this wrong. (Maybe OCR happens at the pre-PDF level where the scanner can read the document in a higher resolution?)
- wladimir 16y ago
  You can indeed do OCR at any stage. The only potential issue I see is that JPEG compression (as used by PDF) might interfere with some OCR algorithm and make it less reliable, so OCRing directly on the raw output of the scanner might yield a somewhat better recognition. Then again, I know nothing of the protocols used by scanners over USB; it might well be that scanners send their result already compressed, or that the resolution is so high compared to the letter size that this doesn't matter.

by cagey 16y ago

lazyjeff 16y ago

If you already have PDFs, isn't OCR simply a PDF --> PDF+metadata conversion? Why wouldn't some open source OCR software work, where you feed it your old PDFs and it outputs OCRed PDFs. Is this some kind of tactic for scanner manufacturers to sell newer versions of scanner or am I understanding this wrong. (Maybe OCR happens at the pre-PDF level where the scanner can read the document in a higher resolution?)

wladimir 16y ago
You can indeed do OCR at any stage. The only potential issue I see is that JPEG compression (as used by PDF) might interfere with some OCR algorithm and make it less reliable, so OCRing directly on the raw output of the scanner might yield a somewhat better recognition. Then again, I know nothing of the protocols used by scanners over USB; it might well be that scanners send their result already compressed, or that the resolution is so high compared to the letter size that this doesn't matter.