OCR old software listing

[Fred Cisin]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, Larry Kraemer via cctalk wrote:
> I used the libtiff-tools (Debian 8.x - 32 Bit) to extract all 61 .TIF's 
> from the Multipage .tif file.  While the .tif's look descent, and 
> RasterVect shows the .tif properties to be Group 4 Fax (1bpp) with 5100 
> x 6600 pixels - 300 DPI, I can't get tesseract 3.x, TextBridge Classic 
> 2.0, or Irfanview with KADMOS Plugin to OCR any of the .tif files, with 
> descent results.  I'd expect an OCR of 85 to 90 % correct conversion to 
> ASCII text.

Software listings need more accuraacy than that.
How many wrong characters does it take for a program not to work?
"desCent" isn't good enough.

85 to 90 % correct is a character wrong in every 6 to 10 characters.
How many errors is that PER LINE?

"But, you can start with that, and just fix the errors, without retyping 
the rest."  Doing it that way is a desCent into madness.
BTDT.  wore out the T-shirts.


A competent typist can retype the whole thing faster than fixing an error 
in every six to ten characters.
Only if there is less than one error for every several hundred characters 
does "patching it" save time for a competent typist.
In general, for a competent typist, the fastest way to reposition the 
cursor to the next error in the line is to simply hit the keys of the 
intervening letters.
It is NOT to move the cursor with the mouse, then put your hand back on 
the keys to type a character.
Using cursor motion keys is no faster for a competent typist than hitting 
the keys of the letters toskip over.


TIP: display the OCR'ed text that is to be corrected in a font that 
exaggerates the difference between zero and the letter 'O', and between 
one and lower case 'l'.  There are some programs that will attempt to 
select those based on context.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com