[lug] OT: Scanning and OCRing

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 07:34:41PM -0700, Craig Talbert wrote:

> <...> I'm wondering if there's anyone here who has
> ever digitized on this kind of scale who can point me in the right
> direction?  

When I was following the Gutenberg project (several years ago) the consensus
was this:

  1) No FOSS OCR programs are up to snuff for this kind of work.  
  2) The people on the Gutenberg lists seemed to prefer Abbyy Fine Reader over
other commercial options.  http://www.abbyy.com/
  3) Many (most?) of them don't even have ADF scanners.

I wrote some wrapper scripts for my ADF scanner (the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet
6200c) which I got on Ebay for $20.  Unfortunately, SANE support is completely
botched now (it used to work mostly ok), to the point that my scanner is
unusable.  So now I'm looking for a new ADF scanner that SANE really supports
(not just says that it supports on the list).  And yes, I filed a bug report,
but honestly no one's interested in spending the time to fix it, including me,
so they should really remove most of the HP ADF scanners from the "supported"
list.