OCR old software listing

[Paul Koning]

> 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