Bob Rosenbloom wrote: You're the man! Yes it definitely helps. Thanks a million. Keith

Bob Rosenbloom wrote: Bob and all, I've taken the liberty of OCR'ing those documents and combined them into a single bookmarked PDF. It's about 9 times smaller, is now able to be searched, text is much more readable. I've tried to keep OCR errors to a minimum, all ~100 pages were hand-proofread and machine-spell-checked. I'm sure I missed a few errors, and there's likely to be very minor formatting issues here or there, but overall I think the quality is pretty good. http://www.techtravels.org/tech/BrianInstrumentsManuals.pdf Thanks again. Keith P.S. Is mbiusa.com on crack for selling these Brikon 723's for $800 and a COPY of the manual for $100?

Bob Rosenbloom wrote: I paid $20 for the unit. It didn't come with anything except a few cables. I haven't taken it apart to see if there are any adapters, etc. I did get a 723-4m/qt model. ABBYY FineReader 9 and Acrobat 8. FineReader works extremely well in general. You need a fast machine (luckily my quad core 2.8ghz w/ 8 gigs of ram qualifies, brag brag) and plenty of patience. Even a good OCR package needs hand-holding to identify non-ocr picture areas vs text areas. And then the software detects OCR errors, which need to be checked one by one -- 95% are false positives. You know that Acrobat 8 supports its own OCR. Which is good, easy, and fast. But it can't (easily) recreate an entire document like FR9. It makes too many mistakes, doesn't have a complete enough interface for fixing problems. It's nice to take an existing PDF and quickly add a search capability to it -- but you wouldn't want to try what I did using it. No doubt. That's why I didn't mind spending the time. The real point is that OCR isn't automatic. The automatic routines get you to maybe 85% or 90% -- you need a fair bit of work to get to or close to 100%. Since google indexes the contents of searchable PDFs, I hope that this OCR copy makes it out there for people to find. Thanks Keith