CompuServe Messages

Hi, Jerry– I did not pay great attention to the scanner/OCR system I used for the Baucus bill, which belongs to my employer. I know it came from Xerox, and cost maybe $10,000-$20,000, making it a little impractical for the typical home user. I figured this was a warmup before I tried scanning in my collection of Journals of the Fluorescent Mineral Society and such things. I spent maybe 2 hours correcting bloops and realigning the text after the scan/OCR operation, which was quick and easy. I shudder to think how it would have been with anything less than a sharp copy of nicely typed/printed material. Since Baucus was double spaced, this was for ~17 pages of single-space text. On a good day, I might have been able to type it almost that fast, but the result would not have been as accurate, I figure – after typing I would have needed to let it 'cool' for a day or two and then review it carefully. And lining it up with the line numbers and same hyphenation breaks might have slowed me down a lot. A sidebar in the new Scientific American hints at a day when a 2-dimensional answer to bar codes could be included as background in printouts that would allow flawless recovery of a text file via scanning. –Doug