From The Department Of Good Problems To Have

[dr_pretentious]

Anybody out there know anything about OCR software?

A couple of Elder Statesmen of the Genre have offered reprints of stories they wrote back in the Age of Typewriters. They're offering to retype the stories, but surely there's a way to take that task off their hands without having to do it myself.

Would taking hard copy to Kinko's make this problem go away? Because it would be lovely to have the Good without the Problem.

Comments

[serasempre.livejournal.com]

I have OCR software. It's not hard to use. If you can send me the stories scanned, I could probably make sense of them fairly quickly, if they're not too long.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Kind of a pain to reformat and proofread, but way less trouble than typing. (Doesn't necessarily take less time -- cleanup can take a while, depending on how clear the original text is. For example, "cl" often comes through as a d, or "rn" as an m, if the original text isn't really crisp. So you have to re-read it as you fix, you can't just rely on the spell-checker when clear becomes dear and torn becomes tom.)

But Kinko's will charge you an arm and a leg.

[wombats.livejournal.com]

As above - it often beats retyping but there are issues. twoeleven once used a late '90s vintage OCR package to digitize an overview of the strategic bombing survey from WWII. The input was from a copy of the typewritten document. The results were amusing. "Von Ribbentrop" was transliterated into "Rubbertron" (neither of us was familiar with this comic book superhero) for example. There were some formatting issues, as well, but overall, it was a win over typing in by hand.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'd like Rubbertron to be a kid-friendly superhero, but I'm afraid he might be drawn and written by R. Crumb.

[shellyinseattle.livejournal.com]

The scanners we've had always came with OCR software. It's easy to use, though you absolutely must proofread. Neither of these were expensive -- $150 got us a really good one that I use all the time for both copying and scanning. It does a good job with images, too, so good for pics.

Best of luck