Summary Details
| Query: |
Sum: OCR software
|
|
| Author: | David Beck | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Computational Linguistics
|
|
| Summary: |
A couple of weeks back I posted a query about OCR software for the Mac that is trainable enough to be useful to a linguist scanning Latin or IPA-based non-English texts. Thanks to Jakob Dempsey Sarah Rilling Michael Betsch Andrew Arefiev Marc Fryd and Daniel Loehr for their responses. In the Mac world, it appears that the front-runner in this area is the widely-available OmniPage programme from Caere Corporation (http://www.caere.com for info). It is apparently trainable although one respondent expressed some doubts about being able to train it to handle more than a single special font. I should also mention that the first sales rep I talked to previously about OmniPage seemed to think that it might have trouble with the combinations of letters and diacrits typical of IPA- based alphabets. However, the publicity literature on the Web site seems to imply that it can be trained to recognize combinations of separate characters and the last sales rep I talked to seemed to think that there was no doubt that OmniPage could do the job. Jakob Dempsey also mentioned an "expensive Kurzweil product" for the Mac, but I haven't heard anything further about this. I also got two responses that mentioned Windows-based applications that are highly trainable. One is a German product called OPTOPUS made by a German company called Makrolog in Wiesbaden which is "exclusively trainable"--that is, it needs to be trained from scratch and so can be configured to any alphabet you like. The other is by a Russian company called Bit Software (www.bitsoft.ru); their programme is called FineReader and in addition to having a wide range of set alphabets for langauges using both Latin and Cyrillic, they report having sucessfully trained it to recognize Icelandic and Tibetan fonts). David Beck ====================================================================== David Beck Department of Linguistics Sixth Floor, Robarts Library 130 St. George St. University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H1 Canada e-mail: dbeck@chass.utoronto.ca phone: (416) 978-4029 (416) 923-2394 (home) FAX: (416) 971-2688 |
|
| LL Issue: | 8.1135 | |
| Date Posted: | 04-Aug-1997 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
|
Back |
||
|
|
||
|
Sums main page
|
||
|
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
|
Report Broken Link
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents. |
|
