Hi! It's reply to original mail in Wikisource-l (but I'm not subscribed to it). I tried to push similar project on Russian Wikiqoutes (see http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0…), but looks like Wikimedia Russia has things with bigger priorities. I see next potential benefits for ABBYY: beta-testing, publicity, spell-checking improvements, tax deductions. FineReader is definitely valuable for not widespread languages or variants (like old Russian orthography). I don't think that remote OCR will works good in all cases. Sometimes it's necessary to make page options modifications. FineReader sometimes may not correctly find prose text boundaries. Also user intervention will be necessary if text contains several languages. ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com. I think from their point of view, it's much better to offer it instead of standalone software, because they could actually check if software used as intended or not as well as make accounting for tax deductions. There are some open source OCR projects: * OpenOCR (http://en.openocr.org) - former FineReader competitor. Support looks poor, but it could OCR some languages (I tired moder Russian), likely major European ones too. * Tesseract (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr) - can't comment on it, but Google looks used it. Eugene.

On 12/01/2011 04:08 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote: After having tried it, I'm less enthusiastic. The web user interface is only upload images, download OCR text. There is no interaction with adjusting segments / zones or training the OCR output. Only 40 languages are supported, and there is no way to indicate special dictionaries for old spelling. Blackletter is only supported for German and Latvian. The upload button is based on Flash, and didn't quite work in Firefox on Linux, but it worked in Opera. It worked OK for a modern (not blackletter) Norwegian text from the 1930s. An advantage is that you can start as low as 50 pages for EUR 3.50. Double that and you get 200 pages. For advanced jobs, I still recommend buying the Professional edition, but some users might find the online version useful. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se