News and Reviews > Mini-Reviews by Members

PDF-XChange Viewer ($FREE version) - Mini-Review

<< < (7/7)

dr_andus:
PDF-XChange Viewer now gets a 5  x  :Thmbsup: from me (was 4½).
No issues re OCR, now - it all seems to work just fine. I see that it currently caters for English, French, German, Spanish, but I have only used the English OCR functionality so far.
-IainB (June 20, 2013, 12:56 AM)
--- End quote ---

I agree that PDF-XChange Viewer is excellent. I used the free version for years, and recently have upgraded to PRO.

Regarding OCR, it is generally fine for most purposes. Where it begins to have problems is with poorly scanned texts. For those situations I use ABBYY FineReader, and there can be a big difference: where PDF-XChange Viewer might have a 60-70% success rate in recognising text (which is basically unusable, as you can't understand a sentence where a third of the words are unintelligible), FineReader produces a 99.99% correct OCR. But these are marginal cases I'm talking about (book pages scanned at a low resolution).

IainB:
...Regarding OCR, it is generally fine for most purposes. Where it begins to have problems is with poorly scanned texts. For those situations I use ABBYY FineReader, and there can be a big difference: where PDF-XChange Viewer might have a 60-70% success rate in recognising text (which is basically unusable, as you can't understand a sentence where a third of the words are unintelligible), FineReader produces a 99.99% correct OCR. But these are marginal cases I'm talking about (book pages scanned at a low resolution).
-dr_andus (July 22, 2013, 07:09 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, there are discernible differences in OCR output quality/accuracy depending on what tool you use, and even the colours of the text being scanned - for example, see notes OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

IainB:
Update 2013-09-10: PDF X-Change restores PDF attributes in explorer detailed view mode.
This is a bonus that I had been unaware of. I have updated the opening post mini-review.
As described in the xplorer² blog on 2013-09-08:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
See PDF details (Subject/Keywords/etc) in windows explorer and xplorer²
In many respects windows XP was the pinnacle of shell integration. Things were simpler but just worked. With the onslaught of windows vista (and 7/8) things got very complicated, the documentation available for the new shell features was poor to non-existent and many things just stopped working like shell column handlers.

Adobe PDF reader quickly lost interest in PDF metadata and attributes like Author or Subject (what you see in detailed view mode in windows explorer). People who used this information to browse and organize their scanned PDF documents in windows XP immediately felt the problem. In later windows you can only see such properties using the PDF property page, which isn't very convenient for large collections of documents and neither you can search for such PDF information.

You can bring back this information in your windows explorer and other shell-aware file managers like xplorer² by installing PDF XChange viewer. Unlike Adobe, these guys know all about offering quality shell extensions that work both in 32 and 64 bit windows. When you install PDF XChange viewer you can tick off all components except for Shell extensions — if you are after a lightweight solution. This part of the program is completely free for all uses (including commercial).

As you can see in the picture to the right, after installing this tool the PDF columns come back to life and you can browse the missing details. Note that the Keyword property still isn't available in windows explorer but you can see it in xplorer². Moreover with xplorer² you can search and filter using such PDF properties as a rule.

--- End quote ---

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page