Re: OCR

[raoul@kerberos.cirl]

Scott Kramer at MIT says:
   On Thu,  2 Jan 1997 14:56 +0200, Eric Smith wrote:

       Can anyone recommend an OCR utility to use in conjunction with hylafax.
       I travel with a pocket VT100 Terminal Emulator and would like to read 
       incoming faxes arriving at my server.  I figure this is the only way to 
       do this.

   Are you trying to convert faxes to ASCII format?  There are utilities
   for converting TIFF fax format to PostScript (`fax2ps' or `tiff2ps')
   and PostScript to ASCII (`ps2ascii'), but I suspect the results would
   be rather lame, especially when a fax contains graphics.

No good, Scott. The fax2ps converts the received tiffg3 to bitmapped
Postscript, suitable for printing with a Postscript printer or
ghostscript.

This guy wants text. He needs a commercial OCR package, such as Omnipage
Pro or others. I've used the modest OCR with the Paperport Vx software, but
not in the automated fashion he is looking for (the Paperport was on a Mac,
my Hylafax server is a Sun). The results were OK....

			Nico Garcia
			Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.harvard.edu