Does Adobe Capture work?

[John Neuhaus]

>New question: We are thinking of getting a product which none of you has
>mentioned so far, so I would like to ask the list once again, for help.
>The product is Adobe Capture, and it claims to be able to convert printed
>documents into PDF files.  Info on Adobe Capture is at
>www.adobe.com/Acrobat/Capture.html
>
>Have you used Adobe Capture?  Does it work?  How error-free is the result?

Southern Cross University has been using Adobe Capture 1.0 for Three months
and yes, it really does work and is in many ways an amazing piece of
software.

However, like all OCR work the documents still contain errors which  need
to fixed manually. I  don't have an error percentage but I do have figures
on how long it took our staff to process the documents.

During our recent project which involved the scanning of 80 exam papers
with an average of 4 pages each we found it took an average of 23 minutes
to complete each paper from start to finish. It seems to prefer sans-serif
fonts and has trouble with most tables, some mathematical symbols, the
letter Q , inverted commas and asterixes which slows the process down for
exam papers at least. We do hope to improve on this with practice but as
you can see it is  very labour intensive.

The advantage over conventional scanning is that the file size is only a
fraction of the original TIFF which means it can easily be delivered from a
webserver across a slower network link or by modem. It also prints
relatively quickly.  The PDF file itself generally does and excellent job
of replicating the original image.

Regards
John Neuhaus

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John Neuhaus,
E-mail:jneuhaus at scu.edu.au
User Services Manager                               Phone: 61-66-20-3751

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Home Page http://wwwlib.scu.edu.au/HomeFolder/JohnsBIO.HTML
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