🚀 go-pugleaf

Please let me know if this is the wrong newsgroup for my question.

We are interested in using a scanner and appropriate OCR-software to
collect natural language text from books, newspapers etc. in order to
do linguistic investigations on the material.
However, we don't know if there is OCR-software currently available
for an affordable price (< $5K) which could be used for that purpose.
The system should be capable to recognize french accents, german
umlaute, at a reasonable robustness (<<0.5% error rate) for typical
book or newspaper texts, and it should run on a Suns 3, a MacIntosh or
on an MS-DOS (386) machine.
Does such a thing exist (yet) ? Did anyone try to read large amounts
of book text with one of the new systems that have appeared on the
marked recently? Did anyone compare different systems? Is is at all
reasonable to try it?

Any help will be highly appreciated.
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|Andreas Eisele                Institut fuer maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung|
|Tel.:    +49-711-121-3128     Universitaet Stuttgart, Keplerstrasse 17    |
|Fax.:    +49-711-121-3141   D-7000 Stuttgart 1,  Fed. Rep. of Germany     |
|Internet: andreas@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.dbp.de                  |
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