ns1b@TIBER.EDRC.CMU.EDU (Nikolaos Sahinidis) (05/18/89)
I would like to transform a large amount of printed data into a text file. Does anyone have experience with scanners and software for Optical Character Recognition ? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Nikos --
davidr@hplsla.HP.COM (David M. Reed) (05/19/89)
I have not yet got to work with an expensive system (such as the kind that come with a dedicated card and cost $3000, like TrueScan), but I have been able to use some inexpensive (<$500) software based OCR programs. From that I would say that my number 1 criteria is for accuracy to be greater than 99%, and secondly to be capable of reading kerned print (preferrable even to have the program prompt for translation when it comes across an unrecognized character such as a double f). Most of the inexpensive programs seem to be limited to typewritten and dot-matrix fixed-space print, thus eliminating what seems to be 98% of what I want to copy (books, magazines, newspapers, LaserJet proportional font output, legal documents, etc.) And 99% accuracy rate will still require you to carefully read what has been translated from image to character, for that means that at least 1 letter out of 100 is probably incorrect. I frequently type 70+ characters per line, so that means I will probably have at least 2 incorrect characters in three lines of text!