(Archived) What is the diff. evernote OCR vs local OCR?

[merk850 0]

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Scansnap OCR to pdf or let Evernote OCR it?

Postby merk850 on Tue Mar 02, 2010 9:48 pm

I have the new Scansnap S1300 and I am using it with the Scansnap Manager software on the Mac. My question is about using the supplied OCR software that came with the Fujitsu. Compared to the last 300m model this comes with ABBYY Fine Reader OCR. I am scanning with the Fujitsu software manager and it is going directly to Evernote. (cool!)

1) Should I run this OCR every time with each scan? It takes longer though because it is processing the OCR and then sending the OCR file to Evernote.

2) OR, should I just scan as PDF and send to Evernote and let Evernote process the OCR? (This is quicker)

3) What is the difference technically, do you think? Is Evernote running superior OCR? Will Evernote return that OCR'd PDF to my local client?

I do not mind paying the premium membership if this is somehow a better work flow.

I am just beginning my home scanning and I want to start the right work flow.

Thanks for any help!

Wayne

[pendolino 6]

wayne - im surprised no one has responded to your questions. i just came across them while doing a search for OCR on these forums for other reasons.

i too have a scansnap although its the s510 white (for mac) and i dont really use the bundled OCR since i think it was on Adobe Acrobat 7 and i find it to be very slow.

however, on your question about the differences between evernote and local OCR, it seems that evernote uses a fuzzy OCR algorithm that is technically different from conventional OCR in that it can only be used for searching your data and not for extracting actual text. to use an example, the word 'cat' in handwriting can be interpreted as 'car', 'cap' and more depending on how unclear the text is when Evernote goes through it whereby local/conventional OCR such as adobe would treat it as one specific word even though it may be wrong.

to me this makes evernote superior but only because my primary use of OCR is for later search and retrieval and not for text extraction that i rarely need.

how long does the ABBYY OCR take to process a page or document? im guessing its faster than the adobe acrobat OCR process since its quite popular.

[engberg 89]

(there were replies to his double-post at: viewtopic.php?f=38&t=15501&p=61313#p61297)