Date   : Fri, 30 May 2008 12:19:50 +0200
From   : anders.carlsson@... (Anders Carlsson)
Subject: [RE: BBC] eBay item, Listing Recogniser

Peter Craven asked:

> Is there a way of scanning the listings in the magazines at text files

It is called Optical Character Recognition and has been around for almost 15 
years or perhaps more. Your scanner may have come bundled with an OCR 
program, possibly a light version of the full product. Microsoft Office also 
comes bundled with a such program, although cleverly hidden so normal users 
should not find it by mistake. It is called something with Imaging, I think.

While the most recent commercial softwares generally do a good job on 
natural text, computer listings in particular those printed on a matrix 
printer tend to be very cumbersome to recognize correctly. Listings from the 
US magazine COMPUTE! printed as typewriter text yields better results. I 
don't know if there were other magazines which typeset their listings in the 
same way.

You can try to run a scan through such software and cross your fingers that 
the outcome will be legitimate. Once you have the text file, someone else 
will help you with methods to transfer it to a BBC computer or perhaps a PC 
tool to first convert it to a binary file.

Best regards

-- 
Anders Carlsson