OCR old software listing

[Kevin Parker]

I've had a lot of success using Adobe's Clearscan for OCR'ing old stuff.
Admittedly it's not perfect but it can improve the quality of an old
document a lot.


Kevin Parker
0418 815 527

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Paul Koning via
cctalk
Sent: Tuesday, 1 January 2019 12:18 PM
To: dwight <dkelvey at hotmail.com>; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic
Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: OCR old software listing



> On Dec 31, 2018, at 7:13 PM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
> 
> Fred is right, OCR is only worth it if the document is in perfect
condition. I just finish getting an old 4004 listing working. I made only
two mistakes on the 4K of code that were not the fault of the poorness of
the listing. Twice I put LDM instead of LD. LDM was the most commonly used.

I wouldn't put it quite so strongly.  OCR even if not perfect can help a
lot.  You can often OCR + test assembly + proofread faster than retyping,
especially since that requires fixing typos and proofreading also.  Many OCR
errors are caught by the assembler, though not all of them of course.  I've
done both in an ongoing software preservation project; my conclusion still
is to use OCR when it works "well enough".  A couple of errors per page is
definitely "well enough".

The program used matters.  I looked at Tesseract a bit but its quality was
vastly inferior to commercial products in the examples I tried.  I now use
Abbyy FineReader, which handles a lot of line printer and typewriter
material quite well.

	paul