I do a lot of scanning of books, takes time and sometimes the accuracy is a
problem but, as you say, moving about is very good and you can use search to
find particular key words.
I have not been using RUBY all that long, their .ark files are huge and not
at all suitable for floppy diskette storage by comparison with flat ASCII
files. Also I have been using KPR for some years now and though it only
generates ASCII it also inserts the page (form feed) character between
pages. With KEDIT, in DOS, a document editor these Form Feed characters are
visible and can be searched for too, can't seem to get that convenience from
NotePad or WordPad and WordPad does other funny things to a flat file when
saved, RUBY doesn't seem to honour page breaks unless in a .ARK file. The
one advantage to the .ARK format is that yuou can save bookmarks with the
file but my early experiments indicate only about 100 pages per floppy, I
get more like 800 or 900 pages as a plain ASCII file.
Here in Canada anyway, books on tape are not usually very current, there is
almost nothing technical, one might get a book on WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS
and if you wish to read the selections from the 10 best sellers list they
aren't there. Steven Leecock, a fairly famous Canadian author and humourist
is hardly represented at all. I have become something of an information
junkey valuing the access to current info and I am afraid I squerral it all
away on floppy, just haven't found a satisfactory way to do this with the
conventional Windows tools and/or RUBY yet and RUBY isn't convenient in many
ways either, hit the scan button and there is nothing you can do until that
page is ready for reading, you cannot be reading one page and editing it
while scanning another and you cannot really use your computer for something
else while RUBY is working. Man I would love to be on their development
team.
Dale Leavens, Cochrane Ontario
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home of the Polar Bear Express!
----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff Kenyon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: scanner question
> I think that now that you mentioned it that is what I'm getting. I'd like
> some opinions on using a scanner to read textbooks on the computer rather
> then recorded books. I'm wondering if it would be something worth while
or
> should I stick with recorded tapes for books? I personally think that it
> would be easier for it to be read on the computer then it would be easier
to
> move from place to place but that is just my opinion. Has anyone tried
> this? If so how successfull have they been?
-
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