Re: Scanning?

[Mike Maginnis <maginnis@tarnover.org>]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:19:20 -0700, "Michael J. Mahon"
<mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:

>Mike Maginnis wrote:

--<snip>--

>
>A searchable PDF sounds like Nirvana--but experience indicates that
>OCR'd documents inevitably have errors that make it through the
>proofing process--and the process is much more difficult as well
>as errorprone.
>
>Scanning is a fine solution.
>
>You didn't mention what tools you have available for compression.
>I find that Photoshop 7's "Save for web.." option is very versatile
>and effective.
>
>For text, pre-processing to increase contrast and drop out the
>background "white" noise, followed by .gif compression with 4
>levels (black, 2 grays, and white) to be excellent.
>
>If you can still see the paper grain in the white background,
>then you cannot achieve good compression--noise doesn't compress!
>
>-michael
>
>8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
>Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

I've got Photoshop CS, but I've not played with image manipulation
levels or compression, so I'm in over my head with that.  I made the
unfortunate decision to purchase a SnapScan One-Touch scanner a while
back, so I'm limited in my image acquiring methods; the One-Touch
won't talk to anything but its own rather rudimentary software.

Most of the errors in an OCR documents could probably be caught with a
spellchecker - the hard part comes with character-by-character
proofing the sections of programming code.

- Mike
maginnis@tarnover.org