I've had a lot of success using Adobe's Clearscan for OCR'ing old stuff. Admittedly it's not perfect but it can improve the quality of an old document a lot.
Kevin Parker 0418 815 527 -----Original Message----- From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Paul Koning via cctalk Sent: Tuesday, 1 January 2019 12:18 PM To: dwight <dkel...@hotmail.com>; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: OCR old software listing > On Dec 31, 2018, at 7:13 PM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Fred is right, OCR is only worth it if the document is in perfect condition. I just finish getting an old 4004 listing working. I made only two mistakes on the 4K of code that were not the fault of the poorness of the listing. Twice I put LDM instead of LD. LDM was the most commonly used. I wouldn't put it quite so strongly. OCR even if not perfect can help a lot. You can often OCR + test assembly + proofread faster than retyping, especially since that requires fixing typos and proofreading also. Many OCR errors are caught by the assembler, though not all of them of course. I've done both in an ongoing software preservation project; my conclusion still is to use OCR when it works "well enough". A couple of errors per page is definitely "well enough". The program used matters. I looked at Tesseract a bit but its quality was vastly inferior to commercial products in the examples I tried. I now use Abbyy FineReader, which handles a lot of line printer and typewriter material quite well. paul