🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: Tue, 19 May 87 09:53:50 CDT
From: James Peterson <peterson@MCC.COM>

> From: hoptoad!gnu@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (John Gilmore)
> 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. 

We have a Palantir that I have been using for several months to
see how well it works.  It is a 300 dpi scanner with built-in
ASCII conversion.  It comes complete with software to run on a
SUN, but I found it easier to write my own programs to interpret
the scanner output than to use theirs (personal taste -- their programs
run under SunWindows, and I don't).

Over all I've found that they do a pretty good job on most input, but
that the input that I want to scan is close to the margin of acceptable
input -- tables tend to be too small or on poor contrast paper or ...
I can scan, for example, the Zip code directory for Austin in about
an hour, but it then takes me two weeks of evening work to format
it and correct the scanning errors.

So far I have only scanned stuff that should have built in redundancy
that I can check by program.  For example, with the Zip codes, all
scanned zip codes should be in a small range of legal values, the
street names should all be alphabetic, and in order.  And so on.
This allows me to catch a lot of scanner errors without having to
read and compare every entry.  It also tends to expose errors in the
printed input -- no multi-page reference table that I have scanned
has been without printed errors.

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Chuq Von Rospach	chuq@sun.COM		[I don't read flames]

There is no statute of limitations on stupidity