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CNET editors' rating:
4.0
stars
Excellent
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Product summary
The
good: Fast; analyzes and formats tables with great accuracy; understands many languages.
The
bad: Limited documentation; won't process batches of documents at once.
The
bottom
line: Thanks to its killer accuracy, Presto OCR is a powerhouse bargain--perfect for home and casual use. Only OmniPage, with its batch-processing scheduler, is a serious competitor.
Specifications: License qty: 1 user ; License type: Complete package ; Min Operating system: Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition , Microsoft Windows 95 , Microsoft Windows 2000 , Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP3 , Microsoft Windows 98 ; ; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 12/18/2000
Click and Scan
Presto's logical interface presents all OCR tasks as buttons across the top of the screen. Click these buttons to scan a document (or to open the bitmap of a document you've already scanned), mark document zones (which Presto calls blocks), recognize the text, proof the results, and save the text. Presto recognizes most languages that use roman type, including Fijian and Basque. And this app sports yet another setting that's worth its weight in code: Choose the Invisible Cell option for tables without grid lines, and Presto rarely misreads rows and columns.
The general recognition skills of this program are impressive. Even before we marked the zones in our documents, Presto made only occasional errors. For instance, on a relatively clean document, it saw two lowercase Ls as a capital U and put a period where a comma belonged. And it mistakenly saw a grainy fax as being entirely in bold and misspelled just one word, rendering About as Alxwt.
Presto's exporting skills are equally adroit. You can tell the program how much of the document's original formatting you want to keep, and Presto churns out raw text, retains original font sizes and styles, or keeps the entire document structure. (In the latter case, it reproduces columns, tables, and text blocks and keeps graphics in place.) Plus, you can save data in several formats: tab- or comma-delimited (for databases), Word, Excel, HTML, or PDF. Presto is the only OCR app CNET tested that exports data as PDF files. OmniPage comes with a demo version of an HTML converter, but you have to spend $100 for the usable version.
Not a Lot of Help
It's a good thing Presto's interface is so straightforward because its manual and online help are sparse. For example, Presto doesn't explain its "Use spaces to show formatting" export option. And although NewSoft's Web site hosts a long list of FAQs, the list is unwieldy and covers a number of different products. Fortunately, the site provides easy access to an email form for requesting tech support.
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