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Experiences with OCR
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| Lira |
Does any of you use OCR often?1
I've got way too many papers here in my room (mostly photocopies of books), and I was thinking of scanning the damn things. Sure, I could scan them as images and then convert them to pdf, but I was wondering whether there was a solution that required less disk space.
So, what are your thoughts/opinions/testimonials concerning OCR?
In case you're wondering what the hell "OCR" stands for and what it is, do read this :) |
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| Xenocreator_PG_ |
| This is the COR forum, not the OCR forum. Easy to mix up. :wtf: |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Xenocreator_PG_
This is the COR forum, not the OCR forum. Easy to mix up. :wtf: |
Bloody dyslexia :( |
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| Subey |
A few years ago I used OmniPage Pro X and by then I got the impression that OCR software was already in a mature state (as opposed to say voice recognition software which sure isn't). So I suspect that whatever you need it for it will do an excellent job.
Or you could invest in one of the ones that the post office uses for letters that does a million characters a minute if you have a lot of pages :D |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Subey
A few years ago I used OmniPage Pro X and by then I got the impression that OCR software was already in a mature state (as opposed to say voice recognition software which sure isn't). So I suspect that whatever you need it for it will do an excellent job.
Or you could invest in one of the ones that the post office uses for letters that does a million characters a minute if you have a lot of pages :D |
I've done a google search and it looks quite interesting. I'm going to do some more reading on this product (and check whether there's a cheaper version :p), thanks :) |
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| jdat |
Have been using OCR since I was 14 years old ( my first OCR app was on Dos!! )
I don't use it so much these days as I don't need to do any massive document scanning.
What's funny is that all throughout my teen years I was such an expert on the subject ... in 2002 I ended up actually working in the field for a couple months! I was in a company consulting for their OCR needs ( they provided outsourcing services to companies and administrations for data quality assurance and document scanning ). This was a little less archaic than hand processed document scanning as all the material arrived on microfilm :D .
Now here is my random post of the day. I actually scanned this and OCR-ed it yesterday ( posted this on another forum so there's a little introductory post as well):
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Hummm this article I am about to post is a little bit off subject, but it is an interview of Albright done by the Financial Times for the weekend 24-25th of june issue( before the current mess started ). Just so you guys understand the interview concept it's pretty basic, have breakfast with the person and say what they're eating, as well as having a regular interview; here goes.
I guess she feels what is being done right now is far worse then what's been done in the past ... somewhat.
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Blast from a marginally happier past
Famously blunt, how does the former US secretary of state rate George W. Bush and her successor and unlikely ‘sister’ Condoleezza Rice?
- By Daniel Dombey
The first I see of the politician who was once the most powerful woman in the world is a slight figure walking up the steps of the Dorchester Hotel.
Madeleine Albright is returning from an interview with BBC radio. A small woman with whitish hair and a blue blazer, she makes her way through the lobby. I linger behind, fiddling with tape recorders and notebooks.
That first glimpse of her is strangely poignant. Albright is a reminder of what now seems a more hopeful age, when solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems appeared within reach.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when she served first as US ambassador to the United Nations and then as secretary of state, hopes ran high of a final deal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peace treaty with North Korea and US rapprochement with Iran.
In the end, none was achieved. The Clinton years are now often remembered for the Monica Lewinsky affair and Albright for the forthrightness that led her to clash with Colin Powell, deride the Cuban government’s lack of “balls” and push for military action in Kosovo.
But, with Hamas in power in the Palestinian territories, Pyongyang boasting of its atomic weapons and tensions running high over Iran’s nuclear programme, things seem a good deal worse today.
When I finally make my way into the Dorchester Grill Room, she is slightly nonplussed by my request that she order breakfast.
She doesn’t seem to have been informed of the FT’s interest in watching her eat. In fact, she must be rather confused as to what she is doing in the Grill Room at ah, since she grabbed a bite before her radio interview.
This is all the more so since the Grill Room is a slightly weird place, with pastel-coloured murals of Scottish scenes and a menu that attempts to celebrate British ness with dishes such as rasp berry porridge and freshly baked stilton bread.
Despite describing herself as a “classic extrovert”, Albright sits rather stiffly on a huge throne like sofa, her small frame dwarfed by the imperial red backrest that climbs half way up the wall. “I’m going to have to have coffee and water,” she says. “We’re on a totality different schedule but you must have something delicious.”
After a little pleading from me, she agrees to play along and gamely saws some slivers off a couple of sausages. I manage half of a serving of scrambled eggs and salmon. Her assistant does marginally better than both of us, making solid progress on the clutter of patisseries on the table.
We talk about London, a city Albright first came to as a two year-old when her family fled her native Prague in 1939. (They returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, but moved to the US after the communists took power.)
She says the second world war gave her a sense of “the importance of America’s involvement in international affairs and the goodness of American power”.
Ten years ago her parents were criticised in the press for failing to have told Albright that three of her grandparents were Jewish and had perished in Nazi camps. (She only learnt of their fate as she was taking office as secretary of state, after an investigation by The Washington Post.)
“The hardest through all of this was the allegations made about my parents, that drove me crazy,” she says. “They were the most loving, protective parents . . . People have no right to make judgments about people who they don’t know, who are not able to defend themselves and did nothing wrong.”
Albright’s father, Josef, is also a link with Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of state, who was his favourite student when he taught international relations at the University 0f Denver.
In a passage hidden away in a footnote in her autobiography, Albright writes of her amazed reaction 18 years ago on learning that Rice was a Republican. “How could that be?” she asked the younger woman. “We had the same father.”
“I can’t say we have a relationship,” Albright says of Rice. “We have a bond through my father and I feel she has been very generous to talk about the importance that he played in her life.”
But what does she make of how Rice is doing in her old job? “I think she probably wonders how things are going,” Albright says, alluding to Iraq. “Kosovo was a relatively short war, 78 days, and I worried every night as to whether we’d done the right thing . . . so I’m sure she worries about that.”
Albright herself seems to be affected by two frustrations. The first is that George W. Bush’s administration has in her eyes made the world a much worse place in which to live. The second is that she is no longer in power.
“We have damaged our reputation very badly,” she says. ‘Iraq may turn out to be the greatest disaster in US foreign policy, which by its very nature it’s worse than Vietnam …. it is in the middle of the most volatile area in the world.”
She has just published another book, The Mighty and the Almighty, about governments’ failure to take due account of religious feelings. Albright argues the USSR and the US underestimated the role of religion in places such as Afghanistan and Iran, and the world’s great powers still need to do much more to factor religion into their equations.
She is promoting the book at a hectic pace. The week after our breakfast she is scheduled to travel to Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia, returning to her Washington DC home only for a change of clothes.
“It’s taken me a very long time to develop a career and I’m not ready to give it up, so I do a lot of different things she says,” she says.
Indeed she seems to have multiple careers. She works as a consultant, a professor at Georgetown University and heads an anti-poverty commission and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.
Such hyperactivity is nothing new. When she was secretary of state she was so busy that her daughter had to manage her life, scolding her for travelling to flashpoints in the Balkans and for spending too much on shoes.
Would she like to serve in office again? Sure, says the 69-year-old. “I loved being secretary of state — there was nothing better I did. But you don’t get to go around twice as secretary of state.”
She reaches over the table and investigates a muffin. “I definitely can’t eat this,” she says after a semi-bite. “This is chocolate ... Given up chocolate.” “How about a croissant?” “No,” she says, with a hint of steel in her voice.
She brushes away my attempt to bring up the Lewinsky affair as firmly as she did the muffin.
“As far as his policies are concerned, every passing day Bill Clinton will look like what he really is — a great American president,” she says. “A great force of nature . . . Unbelievably smart.” She remembers she would be irritated when he worked on crossword puzzles during briefings but how afterwards he would show he had taken in every word.
But didn’t his legacy fall far short of his promise? In his last year in office, despite hectic negotiations, there was no deal on the Middle East or on Korea.
“The mistake we made was that while [Palestinian leader Yassir] Arafat could certainly make decisions about the size of the Palestinian state because he was their elected leader, he was not in a position to make the decisions about the disposition of the holy places because he wasn’t the only one within the Arab world who had responsibility for that,” she says. “When we started calling people about it, it was too late.”
In retrospect, Albright says, Clinton should have gone to North Korea rather than spend the last days of his presidency trying to get a Middle East deal.
Another regret is Iran. Clinton had hoped he could establish an understanding with the relatively liberal government of Mohammad Khatami in the late 1990s, but mutual distrust and limits on the Iranian president’s power prevented any breakthrough.
Now Iran is involved in a face-off with the world’s big powers over its nuclear programme. Albright is as nervous as anyone else, and asks me whether Jack Straw, lately Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, was sacked for opposing military action.
She is very glum about the state of the world. To cheer her up, I foolishly suggest that western and central Europe is in reasonable shape compared with the divisions of the cold war era. She snorts in disbelief, pointing to Poland’s rightwing government and the continent’s failure to come to terms with large-scale immigration from the south.
Albright gets up to go. “Please don’t say that I chose this table,” she says, pointing to the preposterous red sofa. I promise not to. And then the former secretary of state leaves, still energetic, still wistful of days when she hat the real seat of power.
The Dorchester Grill Room, London
1 X orange juice
1 X breakfast cereal
2 X pork sausages
1 X scrambled eggs with salmon
2 x white toast
2 X coffee
Total: £55.30 ( $ 105 )
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Come on admit it! You liked that article Lira! Especially the lovely drawing at the end ( the newspaper is printed on orange coloured paper and I did some colour correction to try and make it less harsh, all while trying to retain some of the original colouring ). |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by jdat
Come on admit it! You liked that article Lira! Especially the lovely drawing at the end ( the newspaper is printed on orange coloured paper and I did some colour correction to try and make it less harsh, all while trying to retain some of the original colouring ). |
I did :) What program did you use to OCR that? Was it the same as Subey's? (OmniPage) |
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| jdat |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
I did :) What program did you use to OCR that? Was it the same as Subey's? (OmniPage) |
Microsoft Office Document Imaging using a Lanier 2138:
It kicks arse. I can automatically scan stacks of papers! |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by jdat
Microsoft Office Document Imaging using a Lanier 2138:
It kicks arse. I can automatically scan stacks of papers! |
That photocopy machine is way too professional for me :p
Hey, does this MODI thing come with Windows? Wikipedia says it does and I've never seen it. Hmm....
*browses files*
edit: zOMG, I found it! Now I need to check whether I can bring my scanner back to life - as I told you on the phone, it stopped working after I moved house :( |
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| eXo |
I use OCR all the time, but to convert text off of eFax's to documents.
Not actually scanning into OCR. |
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| jdat |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
That photocopy machine is way too professional for me :p
Hey, does this MODI thing come with Windows? Wikipedia says it does and I've never seen it. Hmm....
*browses files*
edit: zOMG, I found it! Now I need to check whether I can bring my scanner back to life - as I told you on the phone, it stopped working after I moved house :( |
well best of luck with that! I quite like the program but actually you are just using the MODI as a gateway to your proprietary scanning software ( that came when you bought your broken thing :p ) or whatever piece of acquisition software you may have.
I just got this a couple days ago:
http://www.pegasusimaging.com/smartscanicr.htm but it's worhtless for me :stongue:
oh man I have been way too geeked out the last couple days. I spent the afternoon watching united nations World Summit of the Information Society webcast archives and adding tons of stuff to wikipedia. .... global change taking place one step at a time :disbelief |
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| Subey |
| quote: | Originally posted by jdat
one stephen at a time :disbelief |
FIXED!!! :thepirate |
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