On 2015-09-26 4:28 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2015-09-26 12:16, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2015-09-25 22:35, Al Kossow wrote:
I have been going back and applying OCR to the
ones on bitsavers.
Are there some in particular that you have a problem with?
Aha. I wasn't aware of that. I've downloaded copies many years ago that
I've been keeping locally. I'll check out the current versions on
bitsavers then.
Al, exactly how have they been OCRed? Looking at them, it would appear
that what you see is still the bitmaps of all the pages, but then you
have the basic text also available for selection/searching.
My issue with that is that the documents are huge, and the experience
just scrolling through them is pretty bad.
Imho, though I am sure I am not alone:
Software which "recreates" the typography of a document from OCR does
not produce an acceptable substitute, I've yet to see a book that wasn't
ruined by it.
Just worth mentioning for anyone who might be tempted - For this reason
and others, the bitmaps must NEVER be discarded (Although of course
bitmaps can be archived in a different file if people want to supply OCR
as well.)
--Toby
Sadly I don't even remember what software I used for OCR about 10 years
ago, but I had something for Windows back then, which actually figured
out fonts and all, and created a plain Word document from the OCR
process. That was a really nice piece of software, which preserved
formatting, fonts and all. I have a short example of the results at
http://www.update.uu.se/~bqt/Clarkson.pdf, which was just a scan of two
pages from a book. I created the pdf from Word.
A process like that is what I'd like, except for figures, which needs to
be kept as bitmaps, I suspect.
Johnny