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OCR and Character Recognition: Affinity Publisher


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Hello Team !

i believe Affinity Publisher would do better job and be even competitive if you had a possibility to do OCR or Characters recognition on loaded PDF or scanned documents.
in fact Publisher should be pair correctly with scanners and have Pro level scan functionalities to allow more Pro to converge or convert to it.
There is a capture software called snagit who does that job so why not Publisher ?

Hope this helps !
Blessings.

Never be the Same Again !
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56 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

so why not Publisher ?

Other products are available to perform OCR for PDFs (including the free Tesseract), so why Publisher?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Other products are available to perform OCR for PDFs (including the free Tesseract), so why Publisher?

Because it is always better to have everything in one place.
ONly they don't work as expected then one can search - find - install and use another one (more suitable to him)

Less is more: less installed software on a laptop/mac is still more.

Blessings.

Never be the Same Again !
---
Dell Optiplex 5090 SFF
Intel Core i5-10500T @2.30GHz with 12GiB 2666MHz DDR4
Intel UHD Graphics 630 for 10th Generation
M.2 2280, 512 GB, PCIe NVMe Gen3 x4, Class 40 SSD

Windows 11 Pro x64 22H2 + LibreOffice 7.5.3

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4 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Because it is always better to have everything in one place.
ONly they don't work as expected then one can search - find - install and use another one (more suitable to him)

Less is more: less installed software on a laptop/mac is still more.

Sorry, but I'll have to disagree.

The function is usually much better when an application focuses on doing one thing well, or at least a related package of things, and its developers understand that function.

OCR is not related to Publisher's mission, and is not like anything else that Publisher does. If OCR is important to you, use an application focused on OCR and you will have better results.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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Forgot to mention: There are obvious functions missing from Publisher that are related to Publisher's mission (e.g., footnotes). It would be far better for all of Publisher's users to implement those functions, and improve the rough spots in the other Publisher features, than to implement OCR. (In my opinion, of course.)

Also, there's an issue with your suggestion of tieing Publisher into scanning functions, as scanning is not available at all on Windows for the Affinity applications. Unless that can be resolved (which, again, I don't see as a core function of any of the Affinity applications) any efforts made for that in Publisher would ignore a large portion of the Affinity user base.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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59 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Because it is always better to have everything in one place.
ONly they don't work as expected then one can search - find - install and use another one (more suitable to him)

Less is more: less installed software on a laptop/mac is still more.

Blessings.

Adding OCR can be a can of worms. There are issues with the various flavors of English and then what about other languages? You have snagit so just check out the OCR issue on the Techsmith forums and you will see what I mean/ Everything in one place is not always better; I have seen programs that do everything but not of it very well

You can set up preset in Snagit to do a panoramic capture and automatically have it run it's OCR over the results. I use Nitro for my PDF work and it has a good OCR engine Tessseract may do it; it is free but I have never used it but for you it may be worth a try if you do a lot of conversions

IF you need a hand with setting up a panoramic capture to OCR just say the word

No one is trying to be a wet blanket with your idea, but a lot of programs ditched scanning a long time ago and left it to specialized programs

Affinity Designer 2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212 Affinity Photo 2.2.2075  beta 2.3.1.2212Affinity Publisher  2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212

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  • 1 year later...
On 4/18/2019 at 2:42 PM, walt.farrell said:

Sorry, but I'll have to disagree.

The function is usually much better when an application focuses on doing one thing well, or at least a related package of things, and its developers understand that function.

OCR is not related to Publisher's mission, and is not like anything else that Publisher does. If OCR is important to you, use an application focused on OCR and you will have better results.

It is a major selling point, that's why! If you are comparing products that can edit import and export pdf's all the competition has this feature. adobe acrobat, Pdf architect, pdfelement etc etc. affinity publisher will not compete with these without it.

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30 minutes ago, derrickmg said:

If you are comparing products that can edit import and export pdf's all the competition has this feature.

I'm not sure what you mean but Publisher can import PDFs and edit them.

Publisher is what inDesign is and not a replacement of Adobe Acrobat. You wouldn't compare inDesign to Adobe Acrobat would you. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

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Acrobat already does this. You have the option of scanning a document and converting the text to editable text. Fine for office use. I use it every day. There are other even more robust applications that are used for business.

Publisher is fine for what it is. It's missing some features that are more urgent, like better text import options, GREP searches, IDML export (the import works great, so far), packaging, etc.. You know, publishy things. There's room for improvement, but OCR's would be a distraction.

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11 hours ago, Cranky Old Huckster said:

GREP searches

It has regular expression support, via options in Find and Replace.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 5 months later...
On 4/18/2019 at 2:56 PM, walt.farrell said:

Other products are available to perform OCR for PDFs (including the free Tesseract), so why Publisher?

Tesseract is not advisable for anyone not familiar with coding. Could you have picked a worst example? I realize you're trying to help but sending people to command line software is evil.

Edited by languidcorpse
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FreeOCR is much better. But I digress, it is a great idea to have it in AP. There is currently no good solution, Acrobat is the worst possible software. Rather than follow other packages for what AP should have why not be inventive and lead. This is a very much needed tool in today's graphic world.

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15 minutes ago, languidcorpse said:

Other products are available to perform OCR for PDFs

 

On 4/18/2019 at 3:45 PM, Rick G said:

Adding OCR can be a can of worms. There are issues with the various flavors of English and then what about other languages? Y ...  Everything in one place is not always better; I have seen programs that do everything but none of it very well

OCR software that works really well tends to be expensive. If you only want basic OCR there are cheap/free alternatives.

As has been pointed out many times, Serif are already working on three apps on three platforms. Do you really think they can start developing OCR software that is any better than other OCR software and then include it in APub, especially at the price they sell APub for?

Sometimes OCR can be handy, but it has nothing to do with page layouts/publishing which is what APub is for. It makes about as much sense as asking Serif to include movie editing, audio recording and 3D model creation in APub.

IMHO Serif should concentrate of making all three apps do what they do as well as possible, not worry about adding endless extra features, that are nothing to do with the core functions of the apps. If OCR is so important, buy some dedicated OCR software. 

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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 year later...

I feel compelled to point out that Google Docs can OCR scanned images.  That is my go-to choice since I do not like all the possible security problems associated with Adobe Acrobat.  Upload the image to Google drive, wait a bit, then right-click on the file name and select Open with Google Docs.  It is good for the occasional OCR task.  Not so much for dedicated workflows or 4MB+ images.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

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On 4/18/2019 at 1:57 PM, Uncle Mez said:

i believe Affinity Publisher would do better job and be even competitive if you had a possibility to do OCR or Characters recognition on loaded PDF or scanned documents.

Macs, starting from Monterey, and iPads, starting from iOS 15, have OCR as part of the system.

Paolo

 

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On 10/18/2022 at 11:04 AM, PaoloT said:

Macs, starting from Monterey, and iPads, starting from iOS 15, have OCR as part of the system.

Paolo

 

I've used that on a few jobs. Word recognition has been 100%, but it changes apostrophes to primes and dashes to hyphens and formats each line of text as a separate paragraph. It's fine for small amounts of text (which is what it's designed for), but I'd hate to try using it on a big job.

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  • 1 month later...
On 4/18/2019 at 3:42 PM, walt.farrell said:

Sorry, but I'll have to disagree.

The function is usually much better when an application focuses on doing one thing well, or at least a related package of things, and its developers understand that function.

OCR is not related to Publisher's mission, and is not like anything else that Publisher does. If OCR is important to you, use an application focused on OCR and you will have better results.

It could be useful to create text styles on the fly, which you can easily replace. I mean, I would't mind if I could use Publisher for this instead of Acrobat Pro. ;)

But it's probably a very difficult feature to implement.

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I think better to use an external solution that forces the user to take responsibility for the translation. Because not all software is equal and if it's added in, it's going to be expected to support 256 languages, etc in code.

At best, when plugin support is added, perhaps it can set it up so that these "encoders" or whatnot can feed directly into the program. Or, the API can support it in later versions and 3rd party programs can take advantage of it (when the program is in wide enough use)...

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