OCR Software for the PC

[RJ Emery]

I am running W98 on old but reliable hardware. I have a multifunction Brother 8840D printer/scanner/fax machine, whose scanner and accompanying OCR software (PaperPort SE by ScanSoft) is adequate for the occasional project.

However, I find myself scanning more and more professional papers for which the OCR program makes too many errors [misses punctuation, interprets pairs of characters as a single character (e.g., rn as m), one's as ell's or vice-versa, misinterprets footnotes, super and subscripts, fractions, etc.].

I would like to know if there is better OCR software available, one that might be able to handle technical documents with equations and formulae. An Adobe Acrobat interface would also be advantageous. The OCR output is presently exported to WordPerfect 8, which is a must.

I hope one day soon to acquire a new computer running either XP or Vista, with a higher resolution flat-bed scanner, but that is not possible at present.