RE: Off Topic: Seeking equivalent Mozilla feature

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Abbyy FineReader.

Brian & Patricia:

I seem to recall an OCR program called Presto! being
highly recommended here a couple years back. You
might look for this in the list archives with
XySearch. I think that one is around $100. -- much
more reasonable. Whatever you do, STAY AWAY from
anything by ScanSoft, which has gobbled up most of the
other, former programs in this category, and
dangerously ruined them, IMO. (I guess the model for
this category domination has to be MS and Symantec.
Long live innovation . . . *without* any extant
competition . . . yeah, right.)

The ScanSoft programs will place about a million
shards of itself all throughout your Registry keys,
and you'll NEVER get them out again. You can't
uninstall the damn thing, not even with dynamite. One
of their suites took out all functionality of my
scanner under Win, and this was apparently
irreversible, short of reinstalling the whole OS plus
app.s.

To my mind, this sort of thing is absolutely
inexcusable and unforgiveable. And not so very
uncommon in the Win world. You know, the
uber-arrogant "We Own Your Desktop" syndrome. I had a
similar experience recently with a D-Link USB wireless
Nic. Never mind for the moment that it couldn't
communicate with other brands of router. When I
decided to just cut my losses, I found that the
software it put on could NOT be removed, even in
"SAFE" Mode. I eventually had to roll the Registry
back to a date two weeks prior to the device install,
*and* kill a bunch of its files from "across the
border" of an alternate boot partition. (That's one
example of why it's a big advantage to have a
secondary, "maintenance" boot partition for your OS.
Gets you right around the issue of locked or
untouchable files.) So, D-Link is another company I
will never purchase anything from again.

Please excuse the rant . . . .

> The trouble is that it's designed
> to be installed (built) like UNIX software...you
put
> different pieces in various places, and tweak your
> OS in certain ways. It's silly.

Yeah, but it's a given in their world. It's what I
call "Some Assembly Required" software. And "some" is
sometimes putting it mildly. I'll bet you don't want
to deal with the .MAN format docs, either. That's a
trip in itself, though I wouldn't be surprised if
there's some tool for doing stuff with it in U2.

Apropos of nothing, I had close to zero experience
with HTML editing, but I just substantially altered
and rebuilt a document with the Composer module that's
part of the Mozilla suite. There were several places
where I couldn't get the results I wanted in the
WYSIWYG HTML editor (almost certainly due to
ignorance), so I just used Xy4 to "brute force" the
changes I wanted inside the raw HTML, much like I used
to do many years ago for tweaking raw PCL. In this
case, it was mostly in the nature of changing things
like font size values. This worked out quite well.
Sometimes you can just fudge things, without really
knowing what you are doing.


Jordan