The following excerpts from MacUser / June 1996 may be a factor. The full article can be found at- zdnet.com
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The OCR derby is no longer much of a horse race.
Illustrator versus Freehand. PageMaker versus QuarkXPress. Word versus WordPerfect. Add OmniPage Pro and TextBridge Pro to the list of classic two-horse rivalries in the Mac-applications field. Caere's OmniPage family has set the pace in OCR (optical character recognition) on the Mac for most of the last decade, but in recent years, Xerox's lower-cost TextBridge has come on strong.
With new releases from both companies -- OmniPage Pro 6.0 and the first Pro version of TextBridge -- the competition looks tighter than ever, and you may have a tough time deciding where to place your bets. But after putting both through their paces, we found a winner -- and it wasn't even a photo finish.
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In most of our tests, TextBridge Pro proved a bit faster than OmniPage Pro 6.0 but not significantly so.
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Generally, however, OmniPage's output was closer to the mark than TextBridge's.
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If OmniPage wins by only a nose in accuracy, it leads by several lengths in two other areas: usability and resource requirements.
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Most important, TextBridge gives you no way to edit the text it produces; for that you need to jump to a word processor.
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The last issue is memory. TextBridge Pro's suggested allocation on a PowerPC-based system is 11,720K (10,240K if virtual memory is on), which means you generally can't keep it and another major application open simultaneously on a 16-MB system. OmniPage Pro 6.0's suggested allocation of 6,832K (4,500K with virtual memory) leaves much more flexibility. Xerox's Apple-menu launch utility alone requests 384K; Caere's needs only a meager 32K.
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But our conclusion is that OmniPage Pro is well worth the $20 premium. / Henry Norr
Addendum:
With memory so cheap, is OCR ready for prime time in the consumer market?
-jch |
