🚀 go-pugleaf

> In article <oneil.726211841@cwis>, oneil@cwis.unomaha.edu (Sharon O'Neil) 
> writes:
|> aa479@Freenet.carleton.ca (Michael Wolff) writes:
|> 
|> If you want to do OCR, don't bother with
|> a handheld, because it is way too time consuming.

Not my experience; depends on how much you need to do.  If you need to scan
in dozens of pages of text per day, Sharon is probably right; if you need to
scan in the odd paragraph or pages, a handheld is actually easier to use (IMHO)
for scanning text than images -- requires less accuracy in speed and
orientation of the scanner.

I got a Mustek 800GS, 256 gray-scale and up to 800DPI in line mode; haven't
used it over 300DPI yet, but have done a fair amount of OCR using the Perceive
package shipped with the scanner.  Between the OCR and spell-checking, it's
pretty painless -- much better than having to enter by hand.  I have found
that the OCR can handle multi-fonts reasonably well, and also (surprisingly)
distortions caused by sloppy scanning.

The Mustek also came with Micrografx Picture Publisher LE, which I like a
whole lot...  I've even ordered the Retail version ($129 additional), which
handles JPEG and does a bunch of other things the LE version doesn't.

I was underwhelmed by the documentation for the scanner itself, and for the
basic scanning utilities, but the documentation for Perceive OCR is not bad,
and the documentation for Picture Publisher is pretty good; I understand that
the Retail edition docs are very good, but I haven't seen them yet.  I haven't
tried Mustek tech support, but am not expecting much; Micrografx tech support
has been pretty helpful.