Entered CNET Catalog: 08/03/2001
SKU: W008F400EN
Manufacturer: NewSoft Inc.
Manufacturer description
Presto! OCR Pro 4.0 is the latest version of the award-winning Presto! OCR Pro software, the best OCR for "Real-life" documents. Version 4.0 is loaded with new and improved features! The "Scan&Read" wizard takes you step-by-step to scan and recognize any document in color or back-and white, with support for 40 languages. Presto! OCR Pro 4.0 not only reads documents accurately, it retains the original text formatting and page layout, including columns, tables, and graphics. Presto! OCR Pro 4.0 is the best tool to convert paper into electronic documents. It saves results in HTML, PDF, and other popular file formats; and links directly to your favorite word processors and spreadsheets. With Presto! OCR Pro, you can scan and recognize any document in one step. Just click the "Scan&Read" button to automatically scan and recognize text and tables. You can also scan and recognize multiple documents at one time - Presto! OCR Pro scans all the pages in the "batch", performs OCR, and stores the recognition results for future editing. You're just one click away from sending recognition results to your favorite application!CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- 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.
One other weak point: you can't schedule Presto to wake up in the middle of the night and process the contents of a folder full of scans as you can with OmniPage. But it does let you open up to 10,000 scanned pages, designate a folder to save the results in, and set the process in motion. Presto is also faster. In CNET Labs' speed tests, Presto was one-third faster than OmniPage and almost seven times faster than TextBridge. However, unlike OmniPage, Presto cannot automatically save separate documents in a single scan session to different files.
OCR Heaven
Once upon a time, anyone who trafficked in text had to spend thousands on sophisticated OCR workstations. NewSoft's Presto OCR provides essentially the same functionality in an easy-to-use package for about a hundred clams--a deal for both business and casual scanners.
