mmira@gouldfr.UUCP (Michel Mirabella) (04/24/91)
Hi there, I'm looking for a program that would be able, using a scanner, to read and store characters in a suitable format allowing the use of a word processor. Any information is appreciated. Thanks, -- Michel Mirabella E-mail: mmira@encore.fr
weiss@watson.seas.ucla.edu (Michael Weiss) (04/25/91)
In article <1507@gouldfr.UUCP> mmira@gouldfr.UUCP (Michel Mirabella) writes: > I'm looking for a program that would be able, using a scanner, to read >and store characters in a suitable format allowing the use of a word >processor. You're looking for OCR packages. Depending upon your processor and RAM, there are several ways to go. One is to use a trainable program. These tend to be cheap (under $500), but you have to train it for every typeface you will be scanning, and that can take a while. Trainable programs can run on any 1MB Mac. The other option is to use a "smart" program (automatic, they call it). These run between $700 and $1000, and usually require a 68030 and 4MB of RAM, but they slice the characters up into "strokes" instead of bitmaps. Because of this, you don't need to train them. No matter which type you decide to get, you'd better not expect it to just read the document and spit out nice clean text. It makes mistakes, so you'll hafta run the text through a spell-checker.