blackmesa on 4/5/2001 at 07:27
Is this still being worked on? If so I'd like to help.
I scanned a couple of pages of the manual into pdf's using Photoshop but the files were pretty large. Does anyone know a way to get them down to a more manageable size? Also what you wind up with is a series of pdf images not a real document.
Brad Schoonmaker on 5/5/2001 at 00:47
I'll assume you are talking about my project and say that it is stalled at the moment.
I could give a long list of reasons, but the short of it is my OCR software doesn't want to cooperate in extracting the text from pages with a graphic background. I hope to get going within the next week, though.
I suggest keeping in touch with Shadowcat here or by email about working this out. If you have a way to make pdf files, it might turn out better than the way I'm doing it.
Brad S.
[ May 04, 2001: Message edited by: Brad Schoonmaker ]
Shadowcat on 5/5/2001 at 03:42
Hi blackmesa, thanks for wanting to help!
At the present time we're attempting to get the text out of the manual one way or another. If Brad's OCR glitches are sorted out, this should be faster than typing it all out by hand, but I may resort to that.
Do you also have OCR software for your scanner?? If so, if would be wonderful if you could also have a go at extracting the text from some pages.
With luck we might be able to split the scanning work in half. Does anyone else out there have a scanner and a manual? (Or, to save us a lot of work, a PDF version? (seems worth asking again just in case :) )
Our hope is to create a version using real text, and scanned images where appropriate. We should be able to re-use some images to reduce the file size further, or perhaps simply leave out ones that don't add useful information. At any rate, there should be lots of scanning to do so I imagine that your assistance would be very helpful later on!
[ May 04, 2001: Message edited by: ]
blackmesa on 6/5/2001 at 01:04
I do have ocr software but I never installed it. I'll try it out.
Brad Schoonmaker on 6/5/2001 at 03:46
I'm interested in knowing what the name of it is. I might just plop down the money on a better brand and just avoid the wait on support from IRIS. :(
Brad S.
blackmesa on 7/5/2001 at 04:23
The program I'm using is called Presto Pagemanager. The couple of scans I tried worked well on the text on a light backgound turned out well w/ only a few errrors. However it didn't recognize the text on top of the olive background. I'm going to try scanning at a higher resolution and see if that works.
Brad Schoonmaker on 7/5/2001 at 23:28
Don't bother. It sounds like you ran into the same problem I did. An olive background with text is not readable, apparently. <IMG SRC="shake.gif" border="0">
I did some checking at the software store nearby. The better known OCR brands don't seem to offer the ability to do this, but the latest version of mine specifically states that it can read text on a graphic background. It doesn't work in the demo that I have, though. I'm wondering if it's worth it to buy the full version just to see if the thing does what it says.
Brad S.
Shadowcat on 4/6/2001 at 12:02
Hi all,
Brad, any encouragement from the IRIS tech support?
How about you, blackmesa... did you have any success with the olive backgrounds?
Have either of you tried messing with the image (e.g. converting to grey-scale, or enhancing contrast) between the scanning and the OCR phases?
I'm just wondering (at the start of what's going to be a very busy week at work! d'oh :) whether I should be thinking about typing the manual text in by hand?
[ June 04, 2001: Message edited by: Shadowcat ]
Brad Schoonmaker on 5/6/2001 at 01:16
I tried many ways to get past that problem. My brother suggested scanning in greyscale and then printing that image onto white paper. After that, he said to use the OCR program to scan the page. I did this, but although the printed page was easier to read than the text in the manual, IRIS still wouldn't read it any better. <IMG SRC="shake.gif" border="0">
I doubt I'll get better help from tech support. I might as well buy the full version software. The box does say it can read text on graphics so who knows... :rolleyes:
Brad S.
