KNFB Reader vs. Prismo

By Crysania, 11 March, 2016

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello everyone,

Is it just me, or for OCR and file management, is Prismo far superior to KNFB Reader? Let me share my experience. In my education class, I got a document as a picture taken from another student's phone. Since I paid $100 for KNFB reader, I figured that its file management and OCR capabilities must match the price, so I copied the picture to KNFB reader. I got a well recognized document, but I wanted to copy it to iCloud drive so I could transfer it from my Mac to my apex and refer to it next week in class in Braille. I happily shared it to dropbox, and assumed that I was done. I was a little annoyed that I could not use iCloud drive directly, but hey, no big deal. That was a nice theory, until I opened dropbox only to find that KNFB reader only saves its documents as KNFB reader files.

I performed the same operation with Prismo, for which I paid significantly less money. I saved all three pages to iCloud drive, as a text document, (no need to mess with unnecessary dropbox), and will put it directly on my Apex with a thumb drive.

KNFB reader may be great if you want to read a document on the spot, or even retrieve the content on your phone later, but it offers no capability to share it with anyone who cannot read KNFB files. So if you want to use it on your Mac, on a notetaker, on a PC, or to give it to someone else to work with, KNFB reader offers no tools for making thi sharing possible. Please tell me that I am wrong. I would like to learn that I made an error, and did not pay $100 for an app with extremely limited capabilities.

Options

Comments

By peter on Monday, March 14, 2016 - 16:06

Actually you can save the KNFB Reader files to DropBox as one of a variety of file types. I just tried it and saved a file to DropBox as text.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Go to the File Explorer dialog in KNFB Reader (i.e., the dialog that shows all of your recognized files).

2. Activate the Edit button at the top of the screen.

3. Highlight the file or files that you want to save to DropBox by double tapping each.

4. Activate the Share button at the top of this page.

5. Now you will be presented with a selection of file formats in which to save the recognized text. Select one of these file formats.

6. Now you will be presented with a number of sharing options including mail, message, etc., etc. One of these options will be DropBox (if you have the DropBox app on your phone).

7. Select DropBox and you can save the formatted file in any folder you wish. The default location is the KNFB Reader folder.

Hope that helps.

--Pete

By Bahzad on Monday, March 14, 2016 - 16:06

Peter is right: It's definitely possible to convert the file this way. Having taken a screenshot of the third page on my phone and an image of a printed page, I found that the process works no matter the circumstance.

By Crysania on Monday, March 14, 2016 - 16:06

I definitely should have explored more thoroughly. I usually think of an edit button as being a source of deleting or forwarding things, not sharing, so I didn't even check this out. I thought That it was weird that There was no share button. Now I have two great OCR options.