Re: OCR and Machine Readable Text

[Steve Stewart <steve@resudox.net>]

 I have used OCR a fair bit, and I agree with you,  I think you're being generous by saying  even a 65% accuracy rate. I think our OCR technology today is pathetic, and it would be quicker just to type the damn documents ourselves. I've used a bunch of different packages from guys like HP, and others. I certainly don't know what Alan Olsen was using. Then again, it obviously depends on the quality of the documents you are scanning. So If you had perfect crisply printed, beautiful documents, then maybe you'd get a good accuracy rate. But nice documents, are usually ones generated recently, therefore probably already on the computer, and so they don't even need to scanned. You see what I'm getting at, all the documents we don't have on the computer are, usually, older ones and therefore of lesser quality, so that's why our OCR fails almost more often than not. I guess I'm being a little harsh, I mean this type of technology is quite revolutionary and actually quite amazing, but it's far, far from perfect.

 

Just my 2 cents...

 

    Steve