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We took an informal look at two other optical character recognition (OCR) applications, neither of which at press time was capable of standing up to a full review.
TEXTBRIDGE 1.0. TextBridge 1.0, from Xerox Imaging Systems Inc., keeps things simple with a streamlined interface and a $99 price tag. The catch is that in this release, TextBridge supports only a handful of desktop scanners, has no editing features, and possesses only a rudimentary capability to mark and process zones.
TextBridge functions both as a stand-alone application and as a Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) utility for other applications. That said, the program currently includes just one premade DDE macro--for use with Microsoft Word for Windows--which lets you perform scanning and OCR functions from within Word. When OCR is complete, recognized text appears directly in your Word document, ready for editing. Other products, such as Caere Corp.'s OmniPage Direct, do essentially the same thing, but TextBridge costs much less.
From TextBridge's main dialog box you can decide upon the source of the image to OCR (either a file or scanner) and whether to preview the image before recognition. Between scans, TextBridge saves recognized text in a temporary file and appends the latest scan to this file, but the program offers no deferred processing or sophisticated file handling.
TextBridge...