8 Sep
2004
8 Sep
'04
1:54 p.m.
>>>> "Joshua" == Joshua Boyd
<jdboyd(a)jdboyd.net> writes:
Joshua> On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 01:59:21PM -0500, John Foust wrote:
> I appreciate all the offers to host these files.
>
> I was surprised that there were no suggestions about how to
> augment these files via OCR or PDF conversion.
Joshua> Well, there are certainly plenty of ways to go from bitmaps
Joshua> to PDFs of bitmaps, like the old MIT AI Memo PDFs were done.
Joshua> A few years ago I tried to OCR some DEC manuals, but I wasn't
Joshua> happy with the results I got at all. One program didn't work
Joshua> very well, and the other only wanted to spit out plain text
Joshua> without keeping for formatting or diagrams. They were both
Joshua> commercial programs.
I have had good success with Adobe's OCR plugin for Acrobat -- free
for the download with a 50 page at a time limit. (It will do bigger
docs, in 50 page pieces.) It worked well enough to produce useful
output from a manual full of pictures (a flight manual).
paul