OCR, color addendum and other products. (Optical Character Recognition) (Computer Publishing Conference '90: Gathering on the trail to digital communication) (product announcement)

OCR, Color Addendum and Other Products As usual, we have put in the last section all items that didn't fit conveniently in earlier sections. OCR, which might have gone under Application Software, appears here because some of the OCR systems include hardware as well as software.

We also have included some color items here that didn't make it into our last issue, which featured developments in color. Among the companies included here are Astral Development, Electronic Arts and Slidetek, which offer color software and systems; General Parametrics and Computer Support, with color output products; KYE and Umax, both supplying handheld color scanners; and National Digital, marketer of a non-JPEG data compression scheme.

Optical Character Recognition

The OCR vendors focused mainly on ease-of-use enhancements rather than on new features. Ease of use took several different forms: Caere's Typist, a handheld-scanner-based system that makes OCR portable; Calera's macro that offers access to its OCR software from within Microsoft Word for Windows; and Xerox Imaging Systems' graphical interface, a tremendous improvement over the previous interface for its K5200 system.

Caere touts Typist, Windows 3 software

After hearing many claims and seeing early versions, we finally got to try Caere's new Typist system ourselves. This combination of a nice handheld scanner and a version of OmniPage software seems to merit its lofty billing.

Typist can work from within any application. It serves as a keyboard interrupt. Recognized characters are inserted …