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From: midkiff@portia.Stanford.EDU (Neil Midkiff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware,comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Req. for info on Caere's "Typist"
Keywords: OCR, Caere, scanners
Message-ID: <1990Dec12.004511.25491@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 12 Dec 90 00:45:11 GMT
References: <1990Dec10.224843.2857@spectra.com>
Organization: AIR, Stanford University
Lines: 22


In article <1990Dec10.224843.2857@spectra.com>
 scott@spectra.com (Tim Scott) writes:
>Could anyone offer comments about Caere's new "Typist" product?

I played with one at ComputerWare in Palo Alto (on a IIfx) and was
underwhelmed by its lack of accuracy (though amazed at its speed and
relatively low cost).
Caveat: I did not read the manual, but was assisted by an apparently
well-informed salesperson, who got it working better than on my first
tries.
Although the literature claims that it will recognize any
"non-stylized" font, some of the fonts on their own glossy flyer
seemed to confuse it somewhat.
At best it did about 99.5% (i.e. one error per 200 characters).

At this point I concluded that it wasn't ready for prime time yet.
If this was obviously the result of some maladjustment, I'm sure that
other users will correct this in followups, and I apologize if this is
not a complete picture.  But based on what I know now, it's not on my
I-want-one-for-Christmas list.
-Neil