Posted: 9/4/2011 4:52:40 PM EDT
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I have an old CNC machine manual I need to scan and restore.
It has been copied or faxed several times before being printed, I need to be able to fix selected text, possibly some B&W pics which resemble ink blots as well. I hope to also be able to add notes to correct some Chinglish issues. Tried to use what came with the scanner, no luck. Tried some adobe Reader functions, no good. Do not want to spend a lot just to fix up one manual, do not want/need to create a lot of "Graphics". What works without a bunch of features I will never use, at a decent price? Needs to also be pre-Intel MAC compatible. |
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if it's really chewed up, OCR may have trouble... and that could require a lot of editing.
how may pages are and how dense is the text? any images that go with this? sometimes it's simplest to simply retype the thing. and yes, i've done that before. find some college student on CL with young eyes who will key in the text for a reasonable price and you'll probably have less headache than trying to key it yourself. once you have the text it can be edited to fix the chinglish and cleaned up and saved as a .PDF. i can clean up some nasty scans to straighten pages, de fuzz some of the text, etc... but i'd need a copy of what you've got. evidently Google Docs will convert scanned text into type when you upload a PDF of the image. haven't tried that, but the priuce is right. |
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Commercial OCR seems to run from $150 - $500!
NONE of it appears to be compatible with my recently acquired Power PC MAC G5. 
I had a functioning version of OCR bundled with my old HP scanner/printer, guess I will dig it out and see if I can get it running again. It was not a flat-bed type, so I would have to disassemble the book, about a hundred pages. A few too many for retyping, most are not very dense. |
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i have three flatbed scanners... well, two that work, one is a $40,000 professional scanner that i don't have ths software for, but it's got a HUGE bed.
of you're not in a rush and don't mind sending the document down here i can scan it for you and upload to Google Docs... but i just checked that out and wasn't finding where to upload an image for OCR. all their stuff is web based, so it usually runs on any platform, Mac, Linux or Win. if i absolutely have to i could move it over to my POS Win box and do it from there. perhaps you could coppy a few example pages and snail mail them to me? how is this thing bound? some bindings lay flat and are much easier to scan, if it won't lay flat, it's a pain, but not impossible. depends on what the margins are like. sometimes it's a lot better to unbind it and scan, but i try to avoid doing anyhting destructive. i';; hook up one of the Cannon flatbeds and see what their software does. i THINK it has OCR, but i don't think i''ve ever used it. |
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Found my old scanner, now if I can just figure out which power supply fits it.
Hopefully it will still have an OCR function that is compatible with MAC. I still have my old MAC's too, so I may be able to work this out. The manual is spiral bound so it's not too hard to take apart. |