🚀 go-pugleaf

From: hoptoad!gnu@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (John Gilmore)
Date: 18 May 87 07:57:42 GMT
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco

From: dick@ccb.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski)
>                                   I believe that I would be most delighted
> with one that constructed the PostScript which would generate "approximately"
> the page that was scanned, but with the text in ASCII, not bitmap.  

Good luck.  The scanner manufacturers have tried to jump on the
coattails of the PostScript bandwagon by inventing a scanner language
and calling it PreScript but from what I've seen it is no relation at
all and wasn't worth mentioning except for the cute name.  So far the
scanner industry seems to be taking a severe split -- the guys who give
you bits and, incidentally, here's a floppy for your FeeCees that might
turn that into ascii, sort of; and the folks who are really working on
read-anything scanners.  Don't expect anything in the way of real
character recognition from the cheapies.

> I did take a page of dot-matrix print in to one outfit selling a $2k 300 dpi
> scanner with OCR software for the IBM-PC line, but there were several problems
>    1) The spacing on my sample input overwhelmed the fixed spacing OCR
>       software available then.
>    2) No interface nor software was available for the Macintosh.
>    3) Operation seemed awkward and not at all intuitive.
>    4) Software costs took the package price up to around $3k.
>    5) The best recognition rates seemed to be only 95-98% correct.
> 
> I am told that a $36k Kurtzweil multi-font scanner will do just about
> everything I want.

Since you're in San Francisco you can easily find out.  Go downtown to
the Krishna Copy Center and buy an hour or two's time on the Kurzweil.
They can give you the data on mac disks, IBM disks, or by modem.

I tried to scan in the draft ANSI C Standard a few months ago on that
machine, and while I am not an experienced operator, it had too many
troubles to be useful.  It made 10-20 mistakes per page on the best
of pages (on multi font typeset text, probably offset printed) and in
many cases it would totally garble a line for no reason, while reading
the preceding and following lines without trouble.  As it was, it's faster
to just type the page yourself (or hire somebody who types 90-100 wpm
to do it) than to try to find and fix all the mistakes the scanner makes.
-- 
Copyright 1987 John Gilmore; you may redistribute only if your recipients may.
(This is an effort to bend Stargate to work with Usenet, not against it.)
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