Kludge a fanfold scanner feeder (Was: Overdue context sensitivity in OCR (Was: Best way to scan 132 column fanfold mid-1970s text printout

On Mon, 27 Jun 2011, Dan Gahlinger wrote: There are (WERE?) commercial scanners set up for exactly that. You can put together a system to do it. You can build something MUCH BETTER and more suitable than THUNDERSCAN! Do a few pages manually to confirm quality. Look at all of your printers that have traction feed. If you don't have an adequate selection, post here, and somebody may be able to help. Find the one that has the largest flat area of paper exposed while it is going through the printer. (a printer that has a dozen teeth in its tractor mechanism is obviously going to be better than one with a small round palaten and only 3 or 4 teeth!). I gave my Centronics 101 to CCSF, but I wasn't able to even give away a big Anadex printer that would have been adequate. Even better, would be to trash a printer, and make a rig using just the tractor mechanism, motor, etc. Set up the camera to be able to photograph the exposed area. If the camera is adequate to the task, remove the existing lens, and use a bellows with L39 thread and an enlarger (flat field!) lens. Wire the printer and the shutter release of the camera to a computer. There are many ways to trigger the camera with the computer; I would use a spare printer port, but it's always nice to have a dedicated camera port. DO { Photograph the exposed section of paper. Line feed or form feed to the next section. } UNTIL DONE You have the skills to automate that! Now, replace that printer with one that exposes the entire page(s) at a time, such as the old IBM 360 printers (no idea of model number) A very reasonable fear. Start by taking a very fine point felt pen and make some diagonal edge marks, just like you used to do with decks of cards. It's not adequate protection, but it COULD help. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com