landman@hanami.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman x61391) (12/20/89)
Recently several people have been thinking about buying the DEST scanners, OCR option, and/or Publish Pac software. These are available relatively cheaply since DEST went bankrupt some months ago. Since I've had all of these (model 1000 with OCR add-on, equivalent to model 1010) for a while, I thought a few words of advice might be in order. The scanner itself seems nice, reliable, and well worth the $214 I paid. (Around $300 by the time I got cables, etc.) The OCR option doesn't seem to work well on anything but the sample typewritten page that they use for demo purposes. It has a terrible time with variable-pitch text. Here's an example of its output: Asaconvention,alllinesprovidinggeneralinform#tionaboutthe#le $houldappear f.mst, beforeanym#veinfonna#ion. #oallowforanumberofgamesorproblcmsinone #Ic,lateroccumencesofheader##omnationwill supe#cdcpric,rhcaderinfonnation. The input read: As a convention, all lines providing general information about the file should appear first, before any move information. To allow for a number of games or problems in one file, later occurences of header information will supersede prior header information. If I hadn't gotten this for free, by accident, and the company wasn't dead, I'd be asking for my money back. It's not trainable or adjustable in any way. The Publish Pac software has some nice features, but some problems as well. It really prefers to run in 3 MB of memory *of* *its* *own*, that is, after taking away that used by the OS and other programs. Clearly a 4 MB machine is highly desirable, although it will run fairly well in the 1.7 MB that my 2.5 MB Mac + can give it. It only allows minimal editing of the scanned-in text or graphics; you really need to exit to some other program to do that. I've tried writing gray-scale TIFF files and porting them to my Sun, but the bitmap manipulation package there can't read them even though it says it handles TIFF files. The built-in dithering algorithms are pretty bad - much worse than ThunderScan's, for example - so I don't really want to convert to 1-bit before transferring. The software does run under MultiFinder (6.1, System 6.0.3). The real question is whether there is any alternative software that can drive the scanner. Does anyone know whether such packages as Read-It, Omnipage, etc. can drive a DEST scanner directly? I'm definitely in the market for something better than what I've got now. Howard A. Landman landman%hanami@eng.sun.com