best OCR scanner??

Bill Campbell freebsd at celestial.com
Fri Sep 2 12:27:09 PDT 2005


On Fri, Sep 02, 2005, Gary Kline wrote:
...
>	Well, the book I want to scan is from 1913:: just text.
>	Does this scanner work with FreeBSD? or only Windows?

As somebody else suggested, you may well be better off ``scanning'' books
with a digital camera than with a scanner.  It's often difficult to get a
book to lay flat enough on a scanner bed to get good scans.

I've been planning on getting a photographic copy table that holds the
camera at a fixed distance above its bed.  I think it would also work best
to have a flat glass or plastic sheet that can hold the page flat while
it's been photographed, with something to keep the opposite page out of the
camera's way.

I have to admit that I do all my scanning and OCR on an OS X system, only
marginally related to FreeBSD.  I use an older HP Scanjet with automatic
document feeder (ADF), and the HP software will scan straight to PDF
documents.  The Readiris OCS software can then OCR the PDF file making it
fairly easy to deal with multiple pages.

At one point we developed a perl::Tk program that worked with Vividata's
scanning and OCR software to scan and OCR large documents from high-end
Ricoh scanners with ADF.

Bill
--
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