rbr@bonnie.ATT.COM (4197,ATTT) (11/28/89)
I recieved a recent DAK catalogue that shows a hand held scanner made by "Complete PC" at a resonable price. My system is a TANDY 1000SL, 640K, 40 meg Miniscribe Hard Disk and CM-5 color monitor. My questions are: 1) Has anyone tried this scanner on a TANDY 1000SL ? 2) Is the scanner compatible with the TANDY 1000SL hardware interupt configuration? 3) If the scanner is compatible, is there any PD or shareware OCR software that could convert scanned text into an ASCII file? The software provided seems to be picture oriented according to the DAK advertisement which is more hyp than informative. The 200-dpi resolution, while nowhere near the industry upper limit these days, is better than the 144-dpi resolution of my Star Gemini 10 printer. Thanks much in advance, Robert (Bob) Rager AT&T Federal Systems att!bonnie!rbr
nf0a+@andrew.cmu.edu (Nathan W. Fullerton) (12/11/89)
I have never actually tried the Complete PC Hand Scanner myself, but I can see so reason why it could not be used with the SL. For a kick I once tried a Datacopy 730GS scanner with the SL and TL and there were no problems at all. The SL is more compatible than the earlier ones (except for the goofy ROM DOS that screws up some copy protection schemes...) so I wouldn't expect any undue troubles. Public domain OCR is very rare (I've never seen any), and even if it did exist it probably wouldn't be very good. OCR at its best is VERY unreliable, and with a hand scanner at 200 DPI you shouldn't get your hopes up for Character Recognition (flatbeds have it hard enough). Hand scanners were designed mainly for low-cost picture-grabbing, not for OCR work. Nathan Fullerton nf0a@andrew.cmu.edu