Textbridge Pro 9.0 Business Edition

by Nuance Communications, Inc.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00002S6W2
• Item model number: 31-09559-00
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2002
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,359 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From Winmag®

It's been a long game of leapfrog in the OCR business. Just as OmniPage 9.0 earned a spot on our WinList, ScanSoft released a new version of TextBridge Pro. Version 9.0 has a new interface that looks remarkably like OmniPage's, though it uses tabs rather than panels to separate images from text.

In tests of a page from WINDOWS Magazine, both programs had nine mis-recognized words, but stumbled on different words. During OCR, OmniPage was more aggressive-it tried to OCR text in a graphic-while the TextBridge beta version saved the graphic's caption incorrectly, mixing font and boldface attributes willy-nilly. TextBridge was also inconsistent in converting text-some headings were converted as text in frames, others weren't. This threw off layout fidelity when I opened the page in Word.

TextBridge fared better with headers and footers, though. And it maintained bullet-list text better than OmniPage, though it had more trouble figuring out graphics' dimensions. Its highlighter tool, which marks areas for conversion, is less intuitive than OmniPage's, but it gives you more control of the document.

Version 9.0 of TextBridge Pro can manipulate tables, but the program often mistook cell borders for text and had trouble aligning text within cells when saved to a Word file. With a page containing three tables, OmniPage stumbled on recognizing the first row (in reverse text), but TextBridge couldn't recognize the dimensions of the tables at all.

TextBridge now offers faster proofreading and recognition of 56 languages. Still, the program needs to refine how it automatically locates tables and graphics, recognizes bold and italic text and aligns text within cells. OmniPage has more mastery in translating tables, as well as superior ability to maintain page layout fidelity. With improvements in these areas, TextBridge would surpass OmniPage. For now, however, OmniPage remains our WinList choice as the best all-around OCR package