Jep, this intrigues me, but I'm not up to speed on the items here.
Would you field a couple of questions? ── Or does that make three, and THIS
four? ... Must. break. out. of. infinite. loop... Unnnh!
do forever
say '

'
end
Anyhoo, 1st: any chance that SANE works with parallel port attached scanners?
Yes, but olny a limited number of them and not the one I have as it's originally a scsi scanner with only a parallell port. You have to go to the SANE site and look, or better you check the list at Paul Smedley's site.
The LiDE 25 just costed me about 99US$ (~66€) and worked right away, so it was an easy decision to make as it was listed on the SANE site.
Have a nice one, SMALL, which has a Win31 driver and worked wonderfully under
OS/2 2.1 GA WINOS2 ── at least ten times as fast on exact same hardware as in
DOS/Win31, one of the major reasons that began my "bias" ── however, modern
systems turn out to be TOO fast ── apparently because feeble Win31 doesn't
have a real time delay ── and the between sheets wait is almost non-existent,
much too fast for any reasonable use, and of course no way to change it.
Hmmm, perhaps one should add:
call SysDelay 10000
or
say 'Please replace sheet with the next one and press Enter. Any other key to end scan.'
retval = c2d( SysGetKey() )
if retval = ...
I scanned in hundreds of pages with that little 256-gray level scanner, still
worked fine six months ago, and had a project of scanning in old novels that
are falling apart, but it's unusable with present systems, another LOST bit of
older and simpler technology that actually worked better at OCR than current
flat-bed 2400dpi 48-bit color scanner will, easier, and at lower cost.
It's perhaps possible to tweak something to make it work in OS/2-eCS as well. Doesn't CFM TWAIN nor STi TWAIN work for you?
OK, but what's the output from that software? An Image? Then it's possible to use whatever OCR software that is available to try to extract the text. I've read that STi has got some OCR software that one can buy, but i found it quite expensive.
GOCR 0.43 that I used (earlier version than the one compiled the other day) didn't do a great job even though all text was printed with even spacing, aligned and with clear and distinct characters. I'll try 0.45 when I get the time.
2nd, ignoring the above, have an HP 5 or something SCSI scanner or a couple of
USB models; question is, how well does the OCR program work? I've tried one of
I believe it's not really up to whether you have a scsi, usb or parallell port scanner, it depend more on how much noice it recognize/add to the scanned image, the resolution used and how well the ocr software can cope with that.
the USB under PCLinux, and its error rate can literally be in excess of the
number of scanned characters, better off simply typing it, where with the
above error rate was 1-2% on clear pages, with highly regular mistakes that
search and replace took care of. OCR for current project must deal with
yellowed, sometimes stained, small pages of a paperback, so has to be good.
Yes, I noticed that, as the error rate for the 2:nd, 3:rd etc. scan was very high.
You can combine the script with gbm that has excellent rexx support and preprocess the image a bit futher to change problematic areas such as crop edges, reduce noice and colors etc.
GOCR 0.43 doesn't handle lines, differently aligned (vertical) text, tables etc.
One can however tweak the behavior somewhat with params to see how it tries to detect text and where it fail. I've managed to turn on output to image of detected text in the past, and one can understand that it has quite a way to go yet, but as always, it's getting better.
There are also other ocr software out there, some does a great job, and would be really nice to have in OS/2-eCS as well.