TypeReader 2008 is a corporate-level optical character recognition (OCR) application that combines the fastest OCR technology I've ever tested with the one of the least helpful interfaces I've seen on a modern Windows program. This may be exactly the program you need if you plan to stack hundreds of printed pages into your scanner and use OCR software to transform them into word-processor documents or PDF files. But that's only if you're far more concerned with speed than accuracy. The app is lacking proofreading tools, and if you do need to tweak anything, the inflexible interface makes it tough.
I've been testing OCR products by using them to convert a scanned image of a 700-page book into an editable Word file. TypeReader startled me by getting the job done in less than six minutes—one-third the time needed by my favorite OCR app, Abbyy FineReader Professional Edition. That's infinitely better than the other high-end OCR contender, OmniPage Professional 16, which locked up before finishing the job. But speed is TypeReader's main advantage, and I was almost as startled by its lack of proofreading tools and overall flexibility as I was by its speed. Everything in TypeReader is designed to get the OCR job done quickly.
Like OmniPage Professional and unlike FineReader, TypeReader includes a "watched folder" feature. You can use this to have the app automatically run OCR on an image file as soon as the file appears in the specified folder, which can be anywhere on your network. (Note that FineReader includes this feature in its ultra-high-end enterprise version, which I haven't tested.) Simply start TypeReader running on one computer on your network, specify the output format you want and the folder that you want to watch, and let the program run itself, generating the word-processing or plain-text output as soon as an image file gets created by your scanner. When I tried this method, I was again dazzled by the program's speed, but I was bothered by the frequent minor errors in the output—typically in places where TypeReader couldn't read groups of characters such as "rt" or "tr" and substituted a tilde character (~) in the output as a signal that it couldn't read the text. FineReader and OmniPage read these same groups of characters perfectly.
When I used TypeReader in its non-automated mode to processed individual documents I selected from my hard drive or input through my scanner, the software again proved fast but frustrating. I was impressed by its accuracy at converting tabular data into spreadsheet format or into a word-processing table, but I usually had to tell the program to recognize a page as a table instead of plain text; FineReader and OmniPage both did a notably better job of detecting tables without being prompted.—Next: A Frustrating Interface
A Frustrating Interface
Worse, when the app hits glitches, it doesn't make it easy for the user to offer a helping hand. TypeReader's interface looks like something designed for Windows 95, with clunky toolbars and inadequate menus. After processing a few image files from my drive, I wanted to switch to images imported directly from my scanner, but the program's dialogs would only let me open files, not acquire images from the scanner, and the top-line menu system didn't offer any way to change this behavior.
The help system didn't help, but I finally figured out that the down-arrow next to a "Get Page" button on the toolbar led to a menu. From there, I was able to switch from File mode to Scanner mode. Rival packages, by contrast, include prominent buttons that make it much easier to choose between the scanner and a file. Another problem worth keeping in mind: TypeReader wasn't able to open some PDF and JPEG files that opened smoothly in FineReader; after I alerted the vendor to the problem they updated the program to read the problematic JPEG files and promised that a future version would be able to read the problematic PDF files (in a complex format used by online archives of old magazines and newspapers).
If you're accustomed to the advanced proofreading features in FineReader or OmniPage, prepare to be disappointed by TypeReader. The rival products include multilingual spell-checkers that suggest alternatives to words the apps didn't find in their dictionaries or weren't certain they read correctly. FineReader also pauses over doubtful words, but it doesn't suggest alternatives, so you can't simply select the correct word from a list of suggestions, but have to type in the correction by hand.
TypeReader has been updated to support Vista, but its import and output options seem stuck in the past century. For example, by default, TypeReader, doesn't automatically invert upside-down images or straighten skewed scans, apparently because these features used valuable processor cycles on twentieth-century computers. Today's computers aren't fazed by these features, and it's annoying to have to search the clunky menus for the option to turn them on. By digging into the options dialog, I was eventually able choose among a large number of output formats, including PDF, but the main toolbar offers output material only as a Word or Excel file, or as an attachment to an e-mail message. I was, however, glad to see that the mail option uses RTF format (Rich Text Format) for the output, because RTF is a format that can be viewed on virtually any computer system.
Some machines are built for speed, not elegance, and TypeReader 2008 is one of them. Because I'm not an enterprise-level corporation, and don't expect ever to be one, I'll continue to use our Editors Choice, Abbyy FineReader 8.0 Professional Edition, for its combination of reasonable speed, high accuracy, and brilliantly executed fine-tuning features. If I had a million pieces of paper in the warehouse that needed to be converted into electronic format by next week because of some unexpected legal requirement, I'd consider TypeReader. But, even then, I'd no doubt gripe about the app's lack of accuracy, and I'd be worried that the frequent minor errors, multiplied over millions of pages, might lead to a major problem somewhere down the line. If you absolutely need a more business-oriented, high-volume tool, OmniPage Professional 16, while clunky to use, is a more reliable application, and is more deserving of your OCR dollars than TypeReader.
More ORC Reviews:
• Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional
• Abbyy FineReader Pro (for Mac)
• OmniPage Ultimate
• Prizmo (for Mac)
• ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac
• more
TypeReader 2008 : Options
TypeReaderOpts : Image View
TypeReader 2008 : Text View
TypeReader 2008 : Proofreading
TypeReader 2008 : Tables
