🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <EWB1qRy00Uw8EoY0Cu@andrew.cmu.edu> (Hunter R. Gordon) writes:
>
>A friend of mine typed about 400 double-spaced pages of a book, and now he 
>wants to put the book on his pc wordprocessor (I don't know which he has).  He 
>figures that it'll cost around a dollar a page to hire a typist and he is 
>wondering if there is a cheaper and possibly faster way to do the job.

He might be surprised.  I recently typed in a manuscript for a science-
fiction author friend, and was amazed to find out that commercial services
charged up to $7/page!  (I was charging 75 cents/pg.  He got a good deal.)

>1)  What is available in the text reader market (low and high end)?

Low end is the line scanner type.  They don't work very well.  High
end is the Kurzweil scanners, they work much better, but you still should
count on a couple of errors per page.  These devices aren't perfect,
by any means.

>2)  How much do they cost?

More than your friend wants to spend.  A Kurzweil is several tens of
thousands of dollars.  The minimal line scanner reader sold for about
$400, but I don't know if it's still available.  I think it was called
the OmniScan, or something like that.

>3)  Can they be rented, and if so at what price?

Copy shops here in the San Francisco Bay Area sometimes have them, as
do some word processing services.  They generally charge between $1
and $1.50/page for the scanning.

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
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gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame