A fine start to the day...

As in FineReader, ver. 6.0.

I took the eFax file received yesterday afternoon and exported it as a .tif, then imported that file into FR6, erased the fax headers and footers, despeckled the pages, highlighted the figures, and told the recognition engine to go do its thing.

I first tested FR6 on the first couple of pages, since my initial eyeball of the fax quality raised doubts in my mind, but the program apparently has the ability to make intelligent guesses as to what words ought to be. The spell check shows that when it comes to text, the guesses are probably 90% accurate, if not higher (SWAG); the results are much poorer when it comes to part numbers, etc., which could be anything.

Well, off to do the spell check. Then the half-pager, also from yesterday, as a warmup. Then I'll try to do 12-15 pages of the last part of 60K.

* * *On the home front, I got a couple of calls from my mom. The first was an acceptance of my offer to come help out; the second, a stand-down call. Apparently, my dad will be getting out of the hospital tomorrow (ceteris paribus, which they rarely are), and they'll revisit the offer later.

I hope all goes well. In any event, I should probably give my dad a call to see how he is doing.

Cheers...

Reaching for the golden ring...

I hate it when you get ahead and then something comes along to strike you back down to even lower than where you were to begin with. Of course, the nastiness would have happened even if I'd not bothered with the effort to get ahead, so I guess it's just as well.

There's my dollop of self-pity for the day.

* * *Have you ever repeated a word so many times in succession that eventually, repeating that word becomes an exercise in strangeness, until the constituent sounds of the word cease to have meaning and it becomes almost impossible to mouth them?

Well, I've just had something like that happen with the word "directive," which is used fairly often in this section of the manual that I'm translating. A few minutes ago, I looked at what I'd typed, decided that it was misspelled, somehow, and then gave it a second, long look.

It still looked wrong, but I could not figure out what it was, and then it hit me. Nothing was wrong. Go figure.

Weird.

Anyway, although I've fulfilled my goal of 4,000 words for the day, I'd like to finish 3 more pages, for a total of 17 for the day. That'll put me about 33% of the way through the document. Then I can turn my attention to finishing the process I started by having FineReader analyze that incoming fax from yesterday (the spell check is complete; the saved file, though, does not reflect the tabular form of the original).

Cheers...

FR verdict...

Taking account of the fact that I failed to use the "recognize table" feature (which I still haven't used... I just noticed it's there), I ended up taking a lot more time to beat the text into shape than I perhaps should have.

The spell check earlier today was a bear, frankly (but then again, the fax quality was noticeably short of excellent, so what are we to expect?), but aside from a load of instances where I was asked to confirm that something was right (and it was), I have not yet found any significant number of errors about which I had not been asked (which would imply that FR was committing true errors with confidence, which it wasn't).

So, in the final analysis, given my experience thus far, I've probably wasted too much time for a 2,100 word project, but it was a learning experience, and I did fail to notice the table feature, which may have saved me a bunch of cut-and-paste operations, not to mention having to unscrew the resulting weird formatting.

I do strange things to wind down, don't I?

* * *Feht is back in town. He called a couple of hours ago and we chewed the fat over the wire for a pretty long time. He promises more news of his trip to California on Saturday, when he's invited us (and Olga Z.) to his place for a 5 pm post-Fourth celebration.

It's well and truly late, and I am feeling a bit bushed.

Cheers...