Date   : Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:45:38 +0100
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: The Micro User

"Chris Thornley" wrote:
> You don't have to do all these stages. OCR is really advanced these days
> making this all very simple to do without all this tedious messing around.
> Scanning, Layout and Prof reading built in. Preserving the layout or
> selected different types of finally layout. OCR has moved on from what it
> was in the past.
 
For OCRing it's just three stages: Scan, OCR, proofread. A
computer can't proofread, it doesn't know what it's supposed to
say.
 
Yes OCR packages can scan and create a laid-out document, but *I*
would prefer to lay it out as I *know* how it's supposed to be
laid out; I don't want the mess that the OCR program thinks is the
layout. Headings at 23.8 point, text at 13.86 point, columns of
text arbitarily split and running together, blemishes OCR'd into
the letter O....
 
Diagrams are slightly more work as I manually adjust the contrast
to get the best results.
 
Listings are the hardest part by far. I can recreate the text of
an article in less than 20 minutes, but getting a working listing
is a day's work.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
BBC BASIC for Windows and Internationalisation
  See http://mdfs.net/Software/BBCBasic/Windows/ProgTips