CafeTran

... takes quite a while ...

Let the result better be good!

Took a very long time. Also OCR'd all screenshots in the manual. Results weren't very good. 

What is this post actually about? What were you trying to achieve or show? What were you trying to OCR? So many questions Hans, so many questions.

Verifying your claim that FR can be used to quickly convert an average manual to DOCX.

Any PDF converter can be shown to be, well, anything. Fast, slow, great, terrible. It will depend on the type of PDF, the settings you use in the converter, and about a zillion other factors.

So, for the sake of argument, let's assume you were right and I was wrong (happy now?) and FineReader is crapola and slow and can't quickly and easily and perfectly convert a 9,000-page manual. Then what? Do you have a superior alternative? Or were you just trying to show that some PDFs can't be converted very well with the industry's current best PDF converter?

Michael (puzzled)

>FineReader is crapola and slow

No it's not bad. Of course not. But yes, it is slow. And it is not suited to quickly convert a manual from PDF to DOCX. I think that I'll stick to Solid PDF.

And thank you for asking about my happiness :).

Aha, now we're getting somewhere. 

Which version of Solid PDF do you have? Mac or PC?

Could it be that you converted the same PDF differently in the two programs? Maybe with the "use OCR" switch ON with one program and the "use OCR" switch OFF with the other, or something else that would compromise speed? If the PDF contained editable text there is no need to have use OCR switched ON, for example.

I generally don't find FineReader (or, fine FindReader – ho ho ho) to be any slower than other programs. 

Okay, that must be the reason. Indeed I had it OCR'ing. Hmm...

PS: hey, just read that TM-Town does OCR too. Apparently you can upload PDFs (in 47 different languages) and it will convert them for you. I wonder what it does to PDFs with editable text?

See:

"OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Technology

If your file is a PDF, you will be given the option to import it as a text PDF or use TM-Town's new OCR feature. TM-Town's new OCR feature is available in 47 languages! Just check the "OCR" option and then select the language of your document and its resource type." (https://www.tm-town.com/blog/uploader-and-alignment-redux)