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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.misc,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Character recognition
Message-ID: <21433@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 24-Oct-87 20:51:32 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.21433
Posted: Sat Oct 24 20:51:32 1987
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Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
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In article <2984@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>In article <641@zen.UUCP> vic@zen.UUCP (Victor Gavin) writes:
>> from a scanner image reproduce the original text of the paper in a
>> machine readable form.

>can somebody compare and contrast the O($2k) scanners with the el-cheapo
>Thunderscan for me.  What to the "real" scanners have going for them that I
>can't do with a Thunderscan?

Thunderscan offers very high quality scanning, at resolutions up to
300 dpi, and up to 5 bits per pixel. (32 grays.) It can handle
originals up to 15" wide (in a wide carriage imagewriter) and at least
32767 scan lines long. (I haven't actually tried anything longer than
11", but when it finishes, the "continue scan" button is still waiting
to be presssed.) However, it is slow, (5 to 40 minutes, depending on
resolution and size of original.)  and only works on single sheet,
thin, bendable material. (The material has to fit in the imagewriter
printer.) That means you'd do well to have a xerographic copier handy.
The expensive scanners are flat bed, copier style machines, and do
their work faster (can't be too much faster, though. It takes
15minutes to send an 8"x10" page at 1-bit per pixel 300dpi, over a
9600 baud line if you do not use a compressing transfer protocol.)

Olduvai Software makes a line of software that parses scanned pages
back into text. Either the current issue of MacUser has a review, or I
saw it in a recent copy of MacWeek, but for < $200.00 you get a
software package to do syntactic pattern recognition of letter
features, to determine the ASCII for the scanned page.

It is still cheaper to hire a human typist, but soon the cost balance
will flip the other way. (I expect that copy shops will offer a
service: bring in your books and blank disks, and for a few cents a
page, get them digitized to ASCII. (And won't that boost our needs for
on-line storage (What, only 300Gigabytes! How do your get by with such
a small library?)))

(note, I've directed followups to just comp.misc. If people want to continue
this discussion, they can read it there.)

--- David Phillip Oster            --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
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