Software for OCR'ing paper tape? (was: Question about Military

I've nto seen one, but that doesn't mean it was never tried. In gneral it's easier to read paper tape with a vacuum in that it keeps the tape against the read head... The common metods used to read paper taper were : Mechncial ; I've not seen one that actually makes contact through the holes, but mechancial pins (often called 'peckers' over here) that went throug hthe holes and operated contcts if said hole was there wewre common. Normally the peckers were in a line perpendicualr to tape movement and the tape was moved in steps, but at least one Creed serial tape reader moved the tape continuously nd lifted the peckers in sequence to read ech data trcak in turn, the mechansim then operated a single contact depending on the state of the crurent pecker, thus giving a serial output Optical : We all know how that works. And that it doesn't work for transparent tape. Trend hand a nice design that had 2 sensorts on the sprocket track, 2.5 characters apart. If the one in-line wit hthe data was brighter than the other one by a certain threshold, that meant there was a sprocket hole at the read head, the (weighted?) mean of the 2 sprocket-track sensorts set the thresholds for the data track sensors. It was pretty much self-adjusting. Capacitive : I've never seen one, but apparently Facit tried a thing that detected the cahnge in capacitance when the tape (rather than a hole) was over the read electrode. I am told it was not that reliable... -tony