Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I previously reviewed Able2Extract way back in FCM#95. Since then several new things have been added, so it’s time to give Able2Extract another whirl, this time version 10, and try out the new features.
Conversion From Image
The main thing that Able2Extract (A2E) does is convert image text to either a document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation. It does this by saving to either Microsoft Office, or LibreOffice formats. It says OpenOffice in the toolbar – but the formats are the same for LO and OoO.
The first thing I tried was to take a PDF that was comprised of images and test the OCR functionality within A2E.
While the conversion wasn’t perfect, I purposely chose this text because it was flawed. It was highly compressed, and not your usual serif style font. I wanted to see how A2E would cope with it. And it coped extremely well, considering…
It even managed to recognise, and keep, the italic words, and where words were hyphenated at the end of a line.
Text From A PDF
In most cases you can copy/paste from a PDF. But with some PDF’s (unfortunately, FCM being one of them), you get less than perfect results.
For this test, I converted a page from FCM to a PNG image. With the PDF opened I did a copy/paste of the first column of text.
Next, I opened the PNG page image into A2E and selected only the first column to convert it to LibreOffice Write (ie: text). In the image, you can see, on the left, the PNG image of the column. In the middle you see the A2E conversion. And, on the right, you see the copy/paste from the PDF to LibreOffice.
The clear winner is the A2E conversion. Again, not perfect, but certainly more usable than the copy/paste.
I should also mention that the OCR conversion from image to text is extremely quick with very little waiting time.
Editing PDF Files
A new feature of A2E is being able to edit PDF files. Either by adding/deleting pages, rearranging pages, but also by live editing the text.
Here, I took a PDF that was just text, loaded it into A2E and tried editing the text. Worked like a charm!
In the example image shown below, I have the original PDF loaded in A2E (top) and the edited PDF (bottom). As you can see the edited version has kept the same font, and the edit has nicely blended in the changes.
Clicking the Edit button at the top of the window brings this new feature into play. It’s within the edit section; you can add/remove/move pages within a PDF.
OTHER FEATURES
I won’t bore you with the details of the other features again. If you’d like to read about them then feel free to check FCM#95 for a full run-down of the other features.
But, in short, A2E can do conversion to text by either a full page, full document, or a selected area. Like I mentioned earlier, it can convert to MS Office, LibreOffice, but it can also convert to HTML, AutoCAD, and various image file formats.
CONS
The only one minor downside I have to report is that a couple of the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work. Especially CTRL++ (to Zoom In). CTRL– does work fine, however.
Live editing of PDFs within A2E is a bit slow, but it does work very well. It’s not 100% though, as it couldn’t edit text within any of the FCM PDF files. I’m not sure if that’s a flaw in A2E or in the PDFs exported by Scribus.
CONCLUSION
In short: if you have images/PDFs that need to be converted, then A2E is definitely something I’d recommend. Certainly quicker and probably more reliable than manually typing them in – if you require text. But, only if the images you have are high quality scans. Low quality scans will give errors in the resulting text, but that’s not really a flaw within A2E. OCR software has always required high resolution scans.
Able2Extract: http://www.investintech.com/prod_featuresList_a2epro.htm