Please note, I already have VOCR installed. I'm not talking about that.
I mean things to use with a scanner of some sort, i.e. scanning print books. Also something you can feed graphical PDF files, sometimes Preview will recognize them, but not always. Ditto image files, if they have text. It needs to be able to deal with multiple languages, at least English and German. I imagine just about any of them will do that, but I mention it for the sake of completeness.
Bonus points if anybody knows what will happen if I hook my Freedom Scientific Pearl camera up to the Mac and try to use it. I assume it should work, it's just a document camera after all and not anything particularly special. If not, I know you can use the iPhone as a camera, so any good stand solutions would be helpful. I've got a pretty hefty case on it if that matters, one of the Otterbox cases, and I don't want to have to take it on and off to scan. Obviously this means the software will ahve to do batch scanning.
I've tried Fine Reader, but it was on Windows. Everybody raves about it but IMO it wasn't particularly accessible, and it didn't really seem to do any better or worse than Openbook, in spite of all of the trumpeting about how the AI was going to revolutionize everything. Maybe it's better on Mac though?
I've also used KNFB Reader, or whatever it's called now, again on Windows. I wasn't particularly impressed, again it often did worse than Openbook and the interface was really fiddly. But again, maybe this is different on Mac. When I say the interface was fiddly, you had to go into their navigation thingy to get to files to save/export. Using the arrows to navigate, sometimes it would land on files or whatever it was, and sometimes you had to navigate around a couple of times before it actually landed there. Also, reading a document internally never really seemed to work that well, e.g. sometimes you'd be able to move to the next page/screen, sometimes you couldn't.
So the upshot is that I just stuck to Openbook on Windows, because regardless of everybody complaining that it's super old, it really did seem to work the best. Obvously I can't run that on Mac unless I run it in a VM. So what's good for this kind of work on the Mac these days?
Comments
Scribe from Pneuma Solutions?
Has anyone used this? It seemed to work better than it does now. I wanted a subscription to this one for my birthday, which happens to be tomorrow. When I tried to log in however, I kept getting a CloudFlare pop-up that wouldn't go away unless I quit Safari completely. I also attempted to read a user guide for my hearing aids using Scribe. I've had them since June of last year, and they took a bit of getting used to. Not emotionally but I guess physically. Fortunately though I had plenty of assistance in that area, and I'm very happy with these hearing aids. But I digress. The user guide is 14 pages, and the demo version of Scribe only read one page despite being told otherwise. Overall I think Scribe is very good and could come in handy for a lot of things, but they need to get rid of that CloudFlare thing. I've never used CloudFlare to begin with, and don't know what it is all about.
I did try scribe and it's…
I did try scribe and it's quite insane.
For openbook, I won't start a rant here but look for a 2021 wordpress post on google about it :) In fact I think openbook use a combination of finereader and or omnipage ocr.
Jaws also have ocr scanning built-in since awhile and I don't know why people aren't talking more about it as it can do the job for basic things.
For the mac I personally just plug my canon scanner.
OK, you plug in your scanner and then?
Then what? You're scanning into something, and something's doing the OCR. I'm not really interested in rants about Openbook, I'm not using Windows anymore, unless I'm forced to use Openbook to use the Pearl camera, and I've done my own testing on various document formats. I'm not saying it's great, I'm saying I didn't find anything that's obviously better, as in, it recognized things Openbook wouldn't, or produced cleaner output on potentially problematic documents, e.g. old PDF scans of magazines about Pennsylvania Dutch folklore, liner notes, either physical or PDF scans, and so on.
I was bored so I looked it up. I assume you mean this thing?
https://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com/2021/08/15/my-thoughts-on-the-pearl-scanning-and-reading-camera-from-freedom-scientific/
Dude seems fairly happy with it. FS tells him how to get better scans, mask the opposite page with blank white paper, scan one page, move the book over so that the other page is under the camera, and mask the page you just scanned if necessary. That's for large books.
Re: Scribe
I should have specified. I want something offline, unless whatever's online is doing absolutely amazing scanning I just can't live without. I'm sure there are offline OCR programs for the Mac.
Docuscan plus
Not sure if this even exist anymore, but back in my college days, on my MacBook Pro, I used to use this service from Serotek. It's been a while, so I'm not 100% on all of the features, but I seem to remember that I could connect it to my book share account, and that it also did Daisy files.
If it's still around, it could be found on the Mac App Store. It is pricey though, but it's a one time price, not a subscription, or at least it was not when I used it.
@Khomus Exactly. It might be…
@Khomus Exactly.
It might be unpopular, but I've tried Tesseract awhile ago on a linux vm in fact accessible coconut just to see the packages we have there and it seemed nice. You can install it relatively easily with homebrew. Note that it might be behind other ocr engines especially currently, but for day to day stuff if for whatever reason using the iphone isn't practical it can get the job done. You can feed it with whatever img, or I asume as we ocr pdf often, with ocrmypdf (also installable with homebrew though I haven't tried this one at all).