OT: scanning (was: Re: scanning)

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010, Fairlight wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 06:06:38AM -0700, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
>Bob Rasmussen cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
...
>> The interface itself is rather clunky, and has to be integrated with the 
>> calling application at a very low level, in order to provide event 
>> feedback. Every scanner is different. There are many possible features in 
>> the scanner, so there's some discovery that has to go on. The standard is 
>> vague in some areas, and some scanners don't appear to follow it 
>> precisely. 
>
>That's a shocker.  :)

I have been using the VueScan software on OS X, and have been
very satisfied with it.  The author's support response has been
excellent, it supports many different scanners very well, is
updated frequently with new scanner support, and is available on
many different platforms.

	http://www.hamrick.com/

...
>OCR is a nightmare to even think about coding.  Even SnagIt's text capture
>is a failure on, say, a browser window or a terminal emulator.  Loses or
>gets lots of characters  wrong.  Works perfectly on Windows Explorer or
>other Windows-generated windows, but I think it accesses the objects
>directly then...or handles system fonts better.  Likely cheats...never seen
>it mess up a directory listing.

When we were doing document scanning, and indexing on a large
scale, we used OCR and scanning software from Vividata, using the
OCR of full pages only for indexing, not hoping to have something
readily readable.

Life with OCR is much more interesting when one has to deal with
formatted documents with multiple columns, legal documents with
line numbers and such.  I've used readIris Pro for this, but its
still a PITA to get anything really clean to work with.

Bill
-- 
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