Works far better than you’d expect

I’m amazed at the negative reviews of this app, which are apparently from people who haven’t taken the time to explore its capabilities. Like any tool, it takes time to learn how to use it properly, and to recognize its limitations. These limitations are not the fault of the developer; they are inherent in the screen and formatting. Here’s some tips:

- When I OCR a page on my ScanSnap scanner, I do so at 200 PPI or more, and OCR works almost perfectly. My iMac’s screen has a resolution of 109 PPI, and Condense STILL works quite well. Objectively, this is surprising. It is a credit to the developer that it works at all!

- The new Retina iMac is 218 PPI. That’s four times the area resolution! Obviously this app works best with a Retina display, since the fonts are more crisply defined. (A 13-inch MacBook Pro is even better, at 227 PPI).

- The OCR engine gets confused by underlined text, as are used in many links. Makes sense - the underline runs into the font’s descenders. There’s not much the developer can do about that. Cut him some slack.

- Serif fonts seem to work a bit better than Sans Serif. Of course, you seldom have any option when OCRing text…

- Like with any scanner, the smaller the font, the poorer the OCR. But on a Mac, one can generally expand the text quite easily. Use Command + in Safari, or just use the Reader function. The OCR will improve significantly.

Finally, don’t ignore the multi-language capabilities. My wife is a super-knitter and often uses German or Japanese patterns. Being able to OCR some of the instructions and use Google Translate to read them is very cool.

Wonder if she’s interested in my getting a Retina iMac - purely for her patterns, of course…

Zarkov99 about Condense