Best OCR Software for my Needs

[trevordixon]

I've never used OCR software before, so your advice would be
appreciated. I have a phone number directory I'd like to scan and then
somehow get into Outlook. It's fairly good print quality, so what is
the most accurate OCR software for good print quality, and is there any
program out there that might be able to take the individual records and
organize them in a way that might make it easier to get it into
Outlook?

The scanned image will look something like this:
http://166.70.244.96/names.bmp

Thanks for help,
Trevor

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

I've never used OCR software before, so your advice would be
appreciated. I have a phone number directory I'd like to scan and then
somehow get into Outlook. It's fairly good print quality, so what is
the most accurate OCR software for good print quality, and is there any
program out there that might be able to take the individual records and
organize them in a way that might make it easier to get it into
Outlook?

The scanned image will look something like this:
http://166.70.244.96/names.bmp

Thanks for help,
Trevor

Trevor,

Just about any OCR program should handle that well. I personally use
OmniPage Pro. If I were doing this project, I'd scan it and OCR it
with Omnipage into a Word document, then write a few Word Macros to
reorganize the data into something like a Csv file, then import it
into a database.
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/

 

[Alan Meyer]

Trevor,

Just about any OCR program should handle that well. I personally use
OmniPage Pro. If I were doing this project, I'd scan it and OCR it
with Omnipage into a Word document, then write a few Word Macros to
reorganize the data into something like a Csv file, then import it
into a database.
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/

Charlie's approach looks like a good way to do it.

Another way, if you have programming experience, is to
scan it to text and write a text processing script to break
up the individual entries. It should not be hard to write
in Perl or Python if you know those languages.

 

[Milind Joshi]

Hi Trevor,

There are a lot of software products on the market. The general
tradeoff is, the less expensive a software is, the more manual effort
it takes on your part to be able to use the data, either due to
quality, or due to the lack of automated workflow requiring you to edit
text in a free format manner.

How many pages do you have?

We have a software that can be customized to meet you needs, which you
could use for this task. Alternatively, we also have partners who use
our software to produce what you need, in a format that you can use
easily.

It all depends on:

1. Image volume
2. Budget - will you spend time on this, or would you prefer to get it
done, if so, how much time or money are you willing to spend?

You could send us some more sample images to
info-AT-ideatechnosoft.com.

Regards,
Milind Joshi
IDEA TECHNOSOFT INC.
http://www.ideatechnosoft.com