OCR Dead After Upgrade To Snow Leopard

B

bowjest

Registered
Hello to all,

I've got an HP Deskjet F2280 printer/scanner/copier that has always worked fine until now.

Several months ago I upgraded to Snow Leopard and found that the HP management tools no longer worked - Snow Leopard had taken over that job and shut the management tools out.

I just used the printer and scanner functions under System Preferences and that was that. I didn't like it, but was busy and didn't have time to look into it further.

Now, however, I've found that since Snow Leopard has taken over managing my scanner, I can no longer scan texts to OCR. This is a major problem.

I work as a technical translator and not having the ability to scan articles or texts for clients and then convert them into text for translation is deadly for my productivity.

If there is a way to get Snow Leopard to handle the OCR function I used to enjoy, fine, I'll go with that, but if not, can anyone tell me how I can get around this?

This is really impacting on me completing some projects so I really need some help.

Thanks!

Bowjest
 
A quick read online seems to suggest that HP simply needs to update its drivers for the OCR. That leaves you and many others out in the cold. I found a series of forum entries about this issue here...

Other than that, you may have to look for a 3rd party solution to take the image data from the scanner and apply OCR to it. I assume you need to create an actual document that can be edited from the printed page?
 
TitanShadow,

Thanks. My searches just turned up lots of hits about using HP scanners on OSX, but nothing that addressed this particular issue.

I spoke to Apple and their tech sent me this link:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2010021805585497

I'll trying it out a bit later today. Hopefully that will get things going.

Hopefully without sounding like a whinging old whinger, I'm still a little peeved that Apple produced an update in their software that takes control of a non-Apple device, but doesn't provide the device's functionality. There was no warning that this might happen and had I known, I would have been less likely to upgrade.

If something's not broke, I don't tend to try to fix it.

I hope that link helps others with this same problem.
 
bowjest said:
...

I spoke to Apple and their tech sent me this link:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2010021805585497

I'll trying it out a bit later today. Hopefully that will get things going.

Hopefully without sounding like a whinging old whinger, I'm still a little peeved that Apple produced an update in their software that takes control of a non-Apple device, but doesn't provide the device's functionality. ...
Click to expand...
Did you actually read the article that you linked to? If you had, then you would know that Apple was forced to take over when HP refused to support its own products on the new OS. More importantly, HP refused to support its own customers.

It is my understanding that HP has since changed its mind. MacOSXHints.com has given you a solution to hold you over until HP makes good on its promise.
 
After trying a number of different options to get around this problem (including the woefully inadequate option suggested above - it doesn't work "out of the box", you have to download and install a 2GB set of developer tools from Apple to even get started with that), I found this:

http://solutions.weblite.ca/pdfocrx/

Works a treat!

You can even install language packs to cover a variety of scanned languages.

It's all well and good to say that HP didn't get on board with supplying drivers for Snow Leopard, but then, when they had produced a working product, why should they have to bend over backwards to come up with new drivers when Apple changes the way its platform works? Surely Apple could have just left that portion of the OS the same.

The MaxOSXHints solution was no solution at all. Cumbersome, required too much effort and disk space on my part, and no guarantee that it would even be able to handle non-English scans.

PDF OCR X on the other hand was a simple install and worked right from the start.
 
bowjest said:
...

It's all well and good to say that HP didn't get on board with supplying drivers for Snow Leopard, but then, when they had produced a working product, why should they have to bend over backwards to come up with new drivers when Apple changes the way its platform works? Surely Apple could have just left that portion of the OS the same.

...

PDF OCR X on the other hand was a simple install and worked right from the start.
Click to expand...
Updating software to accommodate new operating systems is hardly unheard of. It is not the new OS that HP should have supported; it was HP's paying customers. You yourself admitted that it was an easy task for the developers of PDF OCR X--developers who received not one dime from HP's customers. Yet HP could not find the time or resources to do the job? Yeah, right. Keep making excuses.
 
Isn't OCR software usually third party, and often not produced by the printer company?
I seem to remember the big task that all printer companies had supporting that Microsoft company when Windows Vista was released. That wasn't one of your overnight, do it quick fixes either....
 
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