Hi, I have just been playing with Text Grabber and Prizmo in conjunction with my StandScan Pro. I decided to try them with a book that I attempted to scan many years ago using a flat-bed scanner and Kurtzweil. My results, possibly, ten or more years ago, were less than satisfactory. In fact, you couldn't follow the recipes because the quantities were illegible. Now, in many ways, the apps we have available to us on the iPhone, are in their infancy. obviously, they are a fraction of the size of, say, Kurtzweil and, also obviously, a fraction of the price. plus, now we are dealing with a portable solution. When you want to read a letter, something simple with no columns etc, both Prizmo and Text Grabber will do the job, especially when using the StandScan Pro. However, imbedded columns and symbols for grammes/ounces/fractions etc can prove daunting for these pocket sized OCR packages. Now that we have a way to position the phone exactly, and we can ensure perfect lighting conditions, when things go wrong it is more to do with the scanning/OCR capability of a given app rather than the physicality of scanning. Also, there is one other variable: to wit, when we use a flat-bed scanner, the book we are scanning is facing down onto a flat surface and gravity alone will heple with ensuring the flatness of the text. Now and again, we may use pressure on that book to make sure that the text nearest to the spine is readable. This we cannot do when the book is facing up toward the phone. So, until apps such as Prizmo or Text Grabber get really clever and learn to deal with distorted text, we aill always have trouble scanning two pages of a book, apart from when we are scanning roughly half way through, because only half way through will allow you to hold the pages equally flat.
With all this in mind, I tried both Text Grabber and prizmo on my "The Big Book of Tomatoes". I wanted results that would mean I could follow the recipes with ease. In the end, for good enough results, I had to use only single page shots. These pages all have paragraphs of text plus columns of ingredients. Below is my best result, there are two significant mistakes, where you will hear 'tilda" it should read "half" (so half a lemon). Also, when it says "s minutes" it should read 5. The rest is perfect, it starts wheE. half way through a sentence and finishes at the bottom, half way through a sentence. We are getting there, these results are much, much better than those obtained by me and my expensive Kurtzweil and flat-bed scanner all those years ago. I do know that kurtzwiel ahs improved since then, but our phones and OCR apps are catching up fast. The point of all this is to draw people's attention to the fact that not everything is about the right position of the phone and the lighting, it is also about software. So, here it is! "f Tomato Soups ~ in the yoghurt. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt, Tabasco, lemon juice and possibly, depending on the ripeness of the fruit, a little sugar. Pick the mint leaves from the stalks and chop very finely. Stir into the soup. Serve very cold. HOT SOUPS BLACK BEAN SOUP WITH TOMATO AND Serves 6-8 AVOCADO RELISH Black beans, not to be confused with black-eyed beans, are small, shiny and kidney-shaped. Their slightly sweet flavour is complemented by onions and garlic, goes well with coriander, cumin and tomatoes, and needs to be pepped up with chilli. This soup combines all those flavours and the result is an intriguingly aromatic, thick and chunky soup, freshened with a 'salad' of raw tomato and avocado seasoned with lemon juice. 4 tbsp vegetable oil 2 large onions, diced 4 garlic c(oves, chopped 1 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp ground coriander 1 tsp dried oregano 1 bay leaf 250 g dried black beans, soaked in water for at least 4 hours and drained 2 x 400 g tins italian tomatoes for ~he garnish 1 firm but ripe avocado, diced 1 tbsp lemon juice 2 plum tomatoes, cored, peeled, 1 tbsp tomato purde 1 scant tsp Tabasco a large bunch coriander (approximately 75 g), leaves only, chopped 1.75 litres hot water or vegetable stock salt and freshly ground black pepper ~,~ lemon seeded and diced 100 g soured cream a few coriander leaves Heat the oil in a large pan and saut6 the onion and garlic for several minutes until slippery but not coloured. Stir in the cumin, ground coriander, oregano and bay leaf, then add the beans. Cook, stirring constantly, for S minutes. Run a sharp knife through the tomatoes a few times while still in the tin and add them, with their liquid, the tomato pur~e, Tabasco and chopped coriander and the hot water or stock. Bring to the boil, turn down immediately and simmer very gently for 3 hours. Discard the bay leaf. Put& half the soup in a food-processor or mouli-legumes. Pass the soup through a sieve, pressing down hard, into Sent from my iPhone -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.