GoodReader drops ball with FineReader's fantastic MRC!

[jonwong]

Am very surprised there's no forum for GoodReader, given that it is so popular.

Anyway, I'm even more surprised that nobody is using FineReader (yeah, it's expensive) with GoodReader. A typical 300-page book without FineReader's MRC compression is about 22MB (150dpi, readable). That same book with MRC compression is 7MB! Imagine carrying 100 such books (300,00 pages in total) on your iPad, and it'll all come up to only 700MB!

Unfortunately, GoodReader left out a key tool that the basic humble Acrobat Adobe Reader has by default: the ability to read MRC compressed PDFs! It reads them, but the text quality is garbled, totally unreadable (unless you're scanning picture books without text at all).

I've written GoodReader's developer about this. (Saturday now). Let's see if he'll respond to this.

Anyway, for anyone intending to use the marvelous FineReader (yes, it is terribly good) with the popular GoodReader... DON'T!!!

Don't buy either if you're only planning to use them together. Because GoodReader just won't work with FineReader's fabulous MRC compression.

But do buy FineReader to do fantastic OCR. Best I've seen, user-interface and all.

 

[AQ_OC]

Am very surprised there's no forum for GoodReader, given that it is so popular.

Anyway, I'm even more surprised that nobody is using FineReader (yeah, it's expensive) with GoodReader. A typical 300-page book without FineReader's MRC compression is about 22MB (150dpi, readable). That same book with MRC compression is 7MB! Imagine carrying 100 such books (300,00 pages in total) on your iPad, and it'll all come up to only 700MB!

Unfortunately, GoodReader left out a key tool that the basic humble Acrobat Adobe Reader has by default: the ability to read MRC compressed PDFs! It reads them, but the text quality is garbled, totally unreadable (unless you're scanning picture books without text at all).

I've written GoodReader's developer about this. (Saturday now). Let's see if he'll respond to this.

Anyway, for anyone intending to use the marvelous FineReader (yes, it is terribly good) with the popular GoodReader... DON'T!!!

Don't buy either if you're only planning to use them together. Because GoodReader just won't work with FineReader's fabulous MRC compression.

But do buy FineReader to do fantastic OCR. Best I've seen, user-interface and all.

The good reader people are very responsive. I write them about adding sky drive support. The wrote me back saying they had other requests for that and a few months later they had support for it.

Does this fine reader work with fonted PDFs or scanned PDFs?

 

[jonwong]

The good reader people are very responsive. I write them about adding sky drive support. The wrote me back saying they had other requests for that and a few months later they had support for it.

That's really good to know. Thanks for the vital notice. Still, GoodReader's popularity (and app's strengths) didn't come from being stagnant; I believe GoodReader's devs are very actively innovating for this product still.

In fact, it is hands down the fastest PDF reader on the iPad. I recommend buying it even though you can't work with FineReader's MRC Compression (but I hope I'm not encouraging them to be complacent about implementing this vital feature).

Does this fine reader work with fonted PDFs or scanned PDFs?

FineReader works with both.

But the real beef is that it works with scanned PDFs, because everybody wants to go paperless (from college students to lawyers).

Scanned PDFs can be about 2MB per page. FineReader compresses that down to about 0.090MB (20 times compression at 150 dpi, fantastic readable quality), even without MRC compression. With MRC, it goes down to 0.020MB (100 times compression, same fantastic readable quality).

The compression ratio makes scanned PDFs comparable to pure "Text and Pictures" PDFs, which gives you every reason to go paperless. Bring your reading material with you anywhere!

Still, like I said, FineReader's non-MRC compression gives decent filesizes (20 times compression), so GoodReader is still a viable reader for such scanned PDFs.

FineReader is wicked at compression ratios (while retaining quality). GoodReader is wicked at rendering speed (not to mention top-notch annotation capabilities). Together, they are indeed a viable solution for scanned PDFs. If GoodReader supports MRC compression (read, not write), you'll be looking at storing 2-3 semester's worth of college reading material (law/humanities courses, no less) on a 16GB iPad!

 

[Tuttle]

With all this hype for finereader, I decided to have a look, but the appstore doesn¡t seem to have it.

Is finereader a desktop package, or is it a piece of hardware?

P.S. After doing a web search, I see that it is an OCR platform for both Windows and Mac Os. But if it doesnt work for Goodreader, then its pretty useless to me as an iPad user. This is true of a number of other tools, such as MathType.

 

[jonwong]

With all this hype for finereader, I decided to have a look, but the appstore doesn¡t seem to have it.

Is finereader a desktop package, or is it a piece of hardware?

Desktop only. FineReader is an extremely competent (like a de facto by now) OCR software. It's 130 euros. Closest competitor is OmniPage. But official magazine reviews (at least the ones that don't seem to be "paid" reviews) says that FineReader is better at OCR and user-interface.

The user-interface is crucial, because it streamlines your workflow when correcting the 1% of the OCR effort that FineReader is uncertain about. In short, you can quickly scroll through the 1% of "unsure recognitions" and correct them easily. Refine the 99% perfect OCR effort. FineReader actually OCRs the 1% correctly, leaving you to just confirm its fantastic guesses; probably a mere 0.1% actually require your correction.

As for user-interface, I found it a little hard to purchase OmniPage online (Nuance is all over the place, offering a multitude of products that aren't even remotely related to OmniPage, and they have no clear cart system). FineReader's cart was easier. So I figured I better go with the company that keeps things neatly together.

FineReader does work with GoodReader. In fact, Readdle (PDF Expert) kindly told me that it's an Apple's API (PDF viewer related one) internal to iPad that fails to provide the functionality to read MRC compressed PDFs. So I should be bugging Apple about this. (Apple seems to have a terrible relationship with Adobe? See Flash.) UPDATE: Just realized that the free "Adobe Reader" on iPad reads MRC compressed PDFs just fine, so I've reverted to Readdle about this. Unfortunately, I've already bought GoodReader, but let's hope they respond to this MRC issue.

STILL, FineReader bumped my 2.2GB scanned pages (836 pages) down to 134MB, even without MRC compression. Quality is 150dpi, but visual quality is 100% perceptually identical to the original scans (and I'm OCD about image quality, keen eyes).

Over time, if you really do need to trim that 134MB book down to 7-10MB, you can use FineReader's fabulous "recognition areas and types" system to convert the pages into just text and pictures (discarding the scanned image altogether). In fact, some of my e-books have a combination of "scanned image" pages and "pure text and pictures" pages. I tend to convert the text heavy pages first, because that's where the most savings (filesize) are.

I say "over time" because FineReader manages each book and its related "recognition areas" and "OCR effort" in separate "Tasks", 1 task (aka project) for 1 book. All your manual refinements are stored neatly, and can be added to incrementally over time.

From the get-go after scanning a new book, however, you'll find the 134MB book more than portable.

I don't know how college students (or lawyers with tons of reading) can do without this. It's that good! In fact, if I read right somewhere, just about every company has FineReader or OmniPage, in the least for "data mining" or "data mine-ability".

So should we go with FineReader given Apple's bad relationship with Adobe (PDF)? Yes. FineReader exports to DjVu and many other formats (HTML, Word, many of which I believe are handled superbly in terms of fidelity to original scan's layout). Should Apple continue to refuse Adobe's technologies, GoodReader folks can easily add DjVu support.

What is MathType? And how is it useful to GoodReader, assuming it does work with GoodReader? Throw me some explanation, save me the search? I did offer you a thorough take on FineReader and GoodReader usage. Thanks in advance!

 

[AQ_OC]

Jonwong,
Thanks for this great info on fine reader. I manage a digital archive that contains scientific journal papers dating back to 1952. All of the article from then to 1988 are scanned. The size of the archive right now is slightly under 15gb. I plan to get the scanned parts redone to further compress the archive to we can develop it for use on tablets! Your into is very timely for me.

Mathtype is a program for typesetting equations.
I use it everyday to create documents that get converted to fonted PDFs. I think the number is users would be considered small compared to the userbase of MS office, but lots of engineering and science&math folks use it. Of course a lot use LaTex too (I quit fooling with it 20 years ago when I turned to the dark side).

 

[Tuttle]

Yep, AQ_OC explained MathType very well. I hadn't intended to imply that it is connected in any way with GoodReader, simply that it is an example of another tool that does not work on iPad. Too bad!

And, yes, thanks for the further explanation about FineReader.

 

[jonwong]

Thanks for this great info on fine reader. ... Your into is very timely for me.

You're welcome. I love scientific journals! Hope to see your services online soon!

Mathtype is a program for typesetting equations.

Is it very different from OpenOffice/LibreOffice's Math? That's a free option.

Of course a lot use LaTex too (I quit fooling with it 20 years ago when I turned to the dark side).

You can't buy back time lost. I'd gladly pay for productivity tools.

Lots of open-source tools do what FineReader does, but you save A LOT of time with FineReader. Well, that's not a good analogy actually, because FineReader's OCR engine is unmatched; no open source projects come close. FineReader has 2 things refined to an extent that you won't find in open source projects:

• OCR accuracy (coupled with fantastic streamlined OCR refinement workflow)
• Image compression ratio and compressed visual quality (was shocked when I first tried the free demo)

I'm looking to do a lot of equations in economics topics myself, so I might need Mathtype soon.

Lastly, about MRC compressed PDFs and GoodReader. Readdle (PDF Expert) had chimed in to say they will definitely support it in future (see here).

That means, if you go with PDF Expert in future, you have only 2 steps in your workflow to converting your scientific journals to tablets: Scan, FineReader (OCR plus MRC compression).

Currently, you'll need a 3rd step to accurately designated "recognition areas" (text, pictures, background pictures), then a 4th step to totally correct/verify the OCR effort. Those steps will give you a filesize that is probably a mere 1MB for a 100-page book! (Since it's all just text and pictures, no chunky scanned images).

Those 3rd and 4th steps are much easier than I make them out to be, given FineReader's user-interface.