I've had some fairly good results with a Fujitsu scanner that can handle
the sheets sideways and then rotate the images automatically. Model is
fi-4530c although there are newer versions. I got this one surplus in a
sealed box about 6 months ago. Been scanning an entire office of
documents with virtually no misfeeds..
It will take wide printer paper turned sideways. it has a setting to
indicate the rotated orientation, it can do duplex color at 600dpi if
needed and is designed so that critical feed rollers can be replaced by
the user when pages start slipping.. nice unit! I have already
scanned an entire file box of wide format printout without issue.
steve
On 6/24/2011 1:20 PM, Richard wrote:
In article<BLU166-W15779C05467E49AA6C9B24C9520 at
phx.gbl>,
Dan Gahlinger<dgahling at hotmail.com> writes:
I have a few rather thick text printouts from the
mid-1970's on 132
column paper ,standard fanfold stuff printed out from DEC teletypes and
line printers I'm wondering what the best way to scan this in would be,
to get actual text out putthat's readable and usable ? In most cases
there is no way even the best OCR could tell the difference betwee nan
"L", "l", "1" or "I", and "O" or
"0" is just as bad. Hand-typing over 6"
thick printout is not my idea of fun. Any bright ideas? there's one
in particular I want to scan in and get documented, as there's an ol
d-wives tale about the code I want to verify if it's true (it's an
original 1970's printout of Zork in Fortran that is supposedly "auto-co
rrecting" after a fashion)not that I buy it... Dan.
I would use a high resolution digital camera and a tripod and
photograph each page. With the right orientation of the printout and
the tripod you can photograph all the "odd" pages first and just flip
through each pair of pages on the fanfold printout. Then reorient
things and flip through all the "even" pages of the printout. A
simple shell script will interleave the images back into their
original order.