Black Ice Software is announcing the release of the new redesigned OCR engine in Printer Driver version 15.50 using Tesseract 4.0.

The Printer Driver OCR engine now allows for three training files (data sets): Fast, Best, and Legacy. Each Training file is over 30MB. Due to the large file size, the Tiff Viewer installers will include only the English version of the Fast training file.

As the names of training files imply; utilizing the Best OCR training file will provide the highest recognition percentage, the Fast training file will also provide the fastest OCR recognition speed, and the Legacy training file performance is between Fast and High Recognition. In addition the Legacy training file also provides backward compatibility for Tesseract OCR engine 3.6.

Based on Black Ice Software QA testing, using English language documents, there was found to be a significant character recognition improvement with Tesseract 4.0. The OCR recognition speed was found to be 40% faster, depending on hardware configuration. Testing found the Fast training file produced the best test results in both speed and accuracy, while, the Best training file was still significantly slower. The Fast training file recognition rate, with our test documents, reached 99.80% accuracy compared with the old OCR engine scoring 94.70% accuracy.

The Black Ice Software’s OCR Language Pack installer will include all three training files (Fast, Best, Legacy) as well as every supported OCR language. Users can experiment with the different training files to confirm which file provide the best results for the document type they are utilizing most frequently. The Best and Legacy training files can be downloaded from the Black Ice Software Website by clicking on the download link for the Language pack installer here.

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The complete list of improvements in the latest Printer Driver includes the following:

• Added "Force paper size" option to the Printer Drivers (#10442)
• Improved OCR, Updated BiOCR.dll to version 12.70.644, Tesseract release October 29 2018 - V4.0.0 (#10335)
• Added Outlook 2019 support (#10379)
• Updated Security Manager for Microsoft Outlook to version 9.1.3401
• Stability improvement for the "Generate output in memory" memory feature, disabled output directory checking (#10440)
• Stability improvement for missing images or blank pages in the output PDF files when certain raster operations are used during printing (#10432)
• Stability improvement for Printer Driver MSI installer for pressing enter key in registration window (#10456)
• Added Print Image Watermark option to the Save As dialog (#10399)
• Stability improvement for using the "Overwrite the exisiting document" option with Custom file naming (#10295)
• Stability improvement for detecting state of the print spooler service in the Printer Manager (#10458)
• Added "Number of Copies" key to the group file (#10013)
• Added INI file option to configure the timeout value of the Merge Window (#10470)
• Updated PDF DLLs to version 3.0.1.704
• Updated Manuals

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