dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (11/22/89)
One of our customer-service people has posed the following problem:
Some of our customers are having difficulty getting problem reports,
execution traces, and so forth to us in a timely fashion. They must
dump the files onto a Sun cartridge tape (an operation with which many
of the customers are not familiar or comfortable), and then FedEx the
tape to us. Due to bureaucratic snafus in the customer organizations,
it frequently takes several days to process the FedEx paperwork and have
the packages picked up. This is resulting in unfriendly delays in our
ability to resolve the problems.
Unfortunately, we aren't in a position to be able to apply a software
patch to the customer organizations :-(. Instead, we need to find some
way of getting the reports to us which doesn't require the sending of
tapes.
In order to reproduce the problems here, we usually need to have the
problem transcripts in a machine-readable form. I suggested that they
be email'ed to us... but, unfortunately, the customers in question
either have no email systems at all, or have in-house email which
doesn't speak to the outside world. The people we're dealing with are
not Unix/Mac/telecom gurus, and probably wouldn't be comfortable with
trying to run XMODEM file-transfers, or anything of that sort.
Next idea... fax. We can receive problem reports by fax without any
trouble... no paperwork is needed. However, this forces our
customer-support folks to read the fax and type the transcript into our
debugging system by hand... not much fun.
I wonder whether it would be possible to equip a Mac with a fax-modem,
and an OCR software package, and automate this process almost completely? Has
anyone tried this combination? Has it worked? Would it work better
with an external scanner? or not as well? How much hand-correction of
the scanned text is needed?
If you have used this sort of combination, I'd very much appreciate
hearing about faxmodems, OCR software, tricks, "gotchas", and so forth.
Please email, if possible... I'll summarize if there's sufficient
interest.
advTHANKSance!
--
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USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303jhm+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jim Morris) (11/23/89)
I don't think so. The main problem is that 200 dot-per-inch FAX makes it hard for OCR to work. They do much better at 300 or 400 dpi. I have an AppleFAX modem and OmniPage OCR software. At the moment, I can't even transfer a received fax file to OmniPage because it won't accept the compress TIFF files that AppleFAX writes out. Apparently, Omnipage is distributing a fix for this, so we'll see. My attempts to scan FAXes in an OCR them have always resulted in low (<90%) recogntion rates and thus a lot of hand correction.
rnovak@mips.COM (Robert E. Novak) (11/26/89)
In article <8ZOjtmS00Uh_E1uolE@andrew.cmu.edu> jhm+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jim Morris) writes: >I don't think so. The main problem is that 200 dot-per-inch FAX makes it >hard for OCR to work. They do much better at 300 or 400 dpi. > >I have an AppleFAX modem and OmniPage OCR software. At the moment, I >can't even transfer a received fax file to OmniPage because it won't >accept the compress TIFF files that AppleFAX writes out. Apparently, >Omnipage is distributing a fix for this, so we'll see. > >My attempts to scan FAXes in an OCR them have always resulted in low >(<90%) recogntion rates and thus a lot of hand correction. I have The Complete PC Fax card and a DEST scanner. I've been unable to transfer files directly in software, but rescans of printed FAXes have had a very high success rate for me! -- Robert E. Novak MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!rnovak 928 E. Arques Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 rnovak@abbott.mips.COM (rnovak%mips.COM@ames.arc.nasa.gov) +1 408 991-0402