TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
I believe both the integrated feature and the standalone product use the same engine. The difference is in the volume you are doing. The more expensive product used to be (and maybe still is) licensed on a per-page basis. That is, you get to capture X thousand pages for your $700 and then you have to pony up some more money. But it is set up for volume applications and automated processing.
As for your difficulties with the built-in module, here is how you are expected to use it (I have no idea whether this would work in your circumstances; this is just the intended process):
After scanning in the pages of a document, you "Find first suspect" (Ctrl-H). The operator (you) looks at the unrecognized blob and types in the correct text. Then you press Tab to go to the next suspect and type in the correct text for that. You continue to the end of the document in this manner. What remains should only be graphics. You may need to do some manual clean-up of fonts, spacing, etc., depending on how fussy you are about the appearance of the pages.
When you are done and do a Save As, the document should be MUCH smaller, unless you choose to save the original image in the file, in which case you have not saved any file size, of course.
HTH,
Dick
PS: If your originals are not clean, you may find that it would be faster and cheaper to pay a typist to recreate the documents.
"Reng, Winfried" wrote:
>integrated into Adobe Acrobat is a paper capture feature.
>It allows you to convert scanned pages (e.g. TIF files
>saved in PDF format) into text.
>We tested it. 10 % of the text was marked as text that
>couldn´t be converted. File size decreased only by 20 %.
>
>Now there is an Acrobat Capture product for around 700 $.
>Does anyone know that? Does it work better?
>What´s the difference to the integrated capture feature?
>
