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  1. 98 votes
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    planned  ·  5 comments  ·  General  ·  Admin →
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    HandyMac supported this idea  · 
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    HandyMac commented  · 

    I wanted to get some text out of a book at Google Books. The first screen shot produced a poor result in VelOCRaptor, but after I enlarged the print several steps (which also required enlarging the Safari window), it worked well enough. I also tried saving the screen shot as a TIFF, but it didn't seem to work any better than the PNG I normally use.

    Offhand I can't think of another situation where I'd need to use a screen shot to get text, except Web pages like Google Books where the text can't be copied; but sure, I expect that as OCRopus gets smarter, VelOCRaptor should be able to work with more marginal input.

  2. 89 votes
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    planned  ·  11 comments  ·  General  ·  Admin →
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    HandyMac supported this idea  · 
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    HandyMac commented  · 

    I picked up VelOCRaptor on a whim when I saw it mentioned at MacInTouch last summer, mostly because I liked the spirit evident in the name and icon.

    I have occasional need for OCR, say to copy a paragraph or a few pages out of a book I'm reading. In the classic Mac OS days I used OmniPage, which came with my scanner; it worked, but was somewhat confusingly complex for my needs. In the OS X era I've used OmniPage (awkwardly "ported" from its old version) occasionally, then tried ReadIRIS, which was really daunting in its complexity. Lately I've just been saving the scans for when I might have time and energy to master the software.

    Until today, when I finally got around to trying VelOCRaptor, and found it, as the little bear said, "just right". I scanned about 15 pages out of a book (300dpi TIFFs), dropped the scans on the icon, then copied the text out of the PDFs VelOCRaptor created, pasted it into TextEdit and went over it. Added an extra return for each paragraph, then used Devon's excellent WordService service to delete all the superfluous returns (cmd-shift-7).

    Yeah, it could be a little more accurate, which is why I'm posting in this thread -- but after all, "more accuracy" is what any serious developer of OCR software would be working toward all the time anyway, no? Does any OCR engine understand hyphenated words? And it was a little funny that it consistently read "McLean" as "McAllen", and read lower case "o" as "0" (zero) in some scans. So it's true that the OCR'd material requires a fairly close reading and a fair number of corrections, but it's sure a lot faster than typing it all in (and I'm a pretty fast typist when I get going).

    Anyway, I'm sure VelOCRaptor will become more accurate as time goes on, but otherwise I like it fine. And I'm sure you have some good ideas to make it better, but don't go adding a whole lot of "kitchen sink" features trying to please everyone. There are already industrial-strength OCR programs available (with byzantine interfaces) for those who need them.

  3. 65 votes
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    under review  ·  9 comments  ·  General  ·  Admin →
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    HandyMac supported this idea  · 
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    HandyMac commented  · 

    Do not, repeat DO NOT, change either the name or the icon; I love 'em, they were a lot of the reason I bought the program sight unseen when I saw it mentioned at MacInTouch last summer. Whoever made the connection between "OCR" and the dinosaur name ought to get a medal -- say maybe a little bronze replica of Clarus the Dogcow.

    Remember the First Law of the Mac from The Macintosh Bible (Arthur Naiman, 1987): "This is the Mac. It's *supposed* to be fun." I bought my first "toy computer" (a Mac Plus) in 1988, and I've been having fun going on 22 years now with the dozen-plus Macs I've owned since (not to mention the hundreds I've worked on for clients). If nothing else, the Macintosh story has demonstrated that there is no real conflict between getting real work done and having a good time.

    For recent Windoze migrants, a cautionary tale: A quarter century ago I lived for a while in the desert metropolis of Tucson, Arizona. Before WWII Tucson was a sleepy little town of under 40,000 inhabitants; now it's over a million. Much of the increase has been refugees from the damp, lush, hay-feverish climate of the Midwest. Many of these immigrants felt homesick, and planted their yards with familiar foliage -- and now Tucson has a higher pollen count than Des Moines, Iowa.

    If you came to the Mac from the deadly serious, conformist corporate world of Windoze -- well, of course we'd like you to feel welcome. But don't try to turn our world into a clone of the one you left. I mean, if you liked it there, why didn't you stay?

    And no, it doesn't need a little "i" added to make the meaning clear(er?). If you're smart enough to use a Mac, you can get it.