alexpgp: (Default)
alexpgp ([personal profile] alexpgp) wrote2009-10-04 08:10 pm

Scanner update...

I scanned a 19-page document (a printout of my tappings about our family's European vacation in 1989) using the automatic document feeder on the Lexmark. FineReader managed the scan and is parsing the scanned data into individual pages as I type this, but the experiment appears to have worked.

The process is not the fastest that can be imagined, but neither is it the slowest.

* * *
Apropos of FineReader, it occurred to me that "printing" the translated PowerPoint presentations to a PDF file (instead of paper) and then having FineReader OCR the result might be a convenient way to do a word count (certainly more convenient than cutting and pasting between PowerPoint and Word).

Alas, this doesn't work too well, at least not for the presentations I worked with. The slides in the presentations are so... busy that FR misses bunches of text, so I guess I'll be doing a lot of Ctrl-C, Alt-Tab, and Ctrl-V tomorrow.

Le sigh.

Cheers...

[identity profile] velvet-granat.livejournal.com 2009-10-05 03:35 am (UTC)(link)
I use Finereader extensively too, and it does tend to get confused about text at times, especially when the page is 'busy' or the original document is too fuzzy. It acts Very Helpfully around documents with lots of images... Do you go through the pages after scanning it in, and double check that it's identifying all the text/table boxes the way you want it to?

[identity profile] apollo14.livejournal.com 2009-10-05 05:10 am (UTC)(link)
Why don't you use File-Properties-Statistic in the *.ppt? It shows the number of words OK.