RE: Looking for old Delta programs

[Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>]

>would the OCR thing work for all that hardcopy ? it's gotten pretty 
good. 
>I don't know if it can handle asr or decwriter fonts though.
>ron

I've seen 'dot matrix' settings in OCR programs, probably both Xerox 
TextBridge and CAERE OnmiPage Pro.

The hard thing with the LP output is that the type goes very close to the 
top and bottom edges of the pages.

TTY output not only has the ribbon-newness problem that the LP output had, 
it also has the paper quality problem.  Having scanned in a few books that 
I helped publish for NESFA Press, mostly from photocopies of typewritten 
mss. or previously published editions in paper-back books, OCRing off of 
newsprint is much worse than off of glossy paper.  It probably helps to 
photocopy it, adjusting darkness to minimize extra fly specks, and then 
dabbing "white-out"/"liquid paper" "just-for-copies" on the fly specks 
(thinly; watch out for shadows from thick bumps of "white-out").  Also, 
keep regular yellow (or white if you have them, but yellow has done fine 
for me) "post-its" handy to mask off whatever you don't want scanned, like 
page headers, or like the first or last few lines if you're scanning less 
than a full page at a time to not have the first or last line fouled up.

(We occasionally cut paper towels down to fit in the TTY when we were out 
of paper and the output was truely dreadful.  Someplace -- the CS dept.'s 
11/45? -- had nice white paper in a TTY, but dropping the bottom edges of 
the characters was all too common.)

- Aron