[Off-topic] potrace

[danny staple]

On 17/04/06, Paul Makepeace <london.pm.org at paulm.com> wrote:
> Je 2006-04-17 17:03:38 +0100, danny staple skribis:
> > intermediate step for OCR, dire as OCR still is.
>
> I would qualify that and say "dire as open source OCR still is".
> Commercial OCR is excellent IME.

Yes, I would say thats a very fair comment. Although unless you are in
the big bucks, ie £1k + a seat, even commercial OCR is pretty dire.
Especially the multifunction device freebies. Convenient yes, and
handy when you have google desktop on windows, but there are still a
lot of errors even on nicely formatted printed sans serif material.

Open source scanning would need to get simpler and more prevalent to
give an incentive to drive open source OCR. I admit, although I put
together PDFScan for my own ease of use, that is one of my
motivations. I am too lazy to try and start to get my head around OCR,
but if I lower the bar to entry to document scanning in Linux it might
kick up its heels a little. I wont pretend that PDFscan is anywhere
near ready to do that though.
--
Danny Staple