[Wikisource-l] [Commons-l] [cultural-partners] ABBYY Finereader 11 on Toolserver: do we like it?

[Lars Aronsson]

On 11/30/2011 09:55 PM, Eugene Zelenko wrote:
> ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com

This is very interesting, OCR as a cloud service. I didn't know they
were doing this. They charge EUR 7 per 200 pages, or US$ 0.05
per page, which I guess can be (almost) reasonable for the
Wikimedia Foundation to pay. I sometimes feel bad because I have
OCRed so many tens of thousand pages with a single EUR 129
license of Finereader. Here, EUR 129 would buy us 3700 pages.

All languages of Wikisource together are proofreading slightly
less than 900 pages/day, for which OCR would cost EUR 32/day
or US$ 43/day. With good OCR, proofreading is more fun, and
these numbers may increase. But then again, we wouldn't need
the service for all pages, as some books already have OCR.

The most interesting feature of a cloud-based OCR service, is
if they can accumulate improvements in font training (?) and
dictionaries from a large number of users over time. With
Wikisource, they can of course get direct access to the page
after proofreading.

So, is the service any good? They even promise to do Fraktur
(blackletter). Does it work well?


-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se