Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!SIMTEL20.ARPA!WMartin
From: WMartin@SIMTEL20.ARPA (William G. Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Document Scanners
Message-ID: <12415307818.26.WMARTIN@SIMTEL20>
Date: 18 Jul 88 15:22:44 GMT
References: <11536@steinmetz.ge.com>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28

Since the subject of scanners came up, I'd like to see anyone on the list
who has had experience with hand-held scanning units, or has done lots
of input from random published sources, like books, newspapers, and magazines,
post their comments and opinions.

The main need I have for a scanning device is for one that will read in
arbitrary print or font types from things that you cannot feed through
a sheet-feeder mechanism designed to process 8 1/2 X 11 paper, and most
scanners I've seen advertised or demonstrated are the latter. I've got
ads from a company called SORICON (Boulder, CO -- 1-800-541-SCAN) which
makes a little mouse-like unit you can run over the print on any size
paper, but the ads don't go into detail on fonts it can read, or state
it can pull data from sources like newspaper clippings or magazine
articles. (The price is $1250 qty 1, if anyone cares.)

I recently got an ad from Palantir on their line and they claim their 
systems can read thousands of fonts, and they show a newspaper clipping
in the ad's illustration of possible input. But it also looks like they
are machines which want sheets fed in, so how would you input text from a
book or newspaper? (I DON'T want to have to photocopy eveything first onto
standard-sized paper!)

Anyone have any advice on this subject? 

Regards,

Will Martin
"wmartin@almsa-1.arpa"
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