Theos-Talk Archives (February 1995 Message tl00213)

LieselFD@aol.com asks:

>Hi, Lee,
>
>Could you please explain to me what a OCR program is? I don't know.
>
> Are you a man or a lady? I used to go by Lee too, because we
> thought Liesel, was too German sounding.  But after I got older,
> & WWII faded into the distance, I went back to Liesel.  In
> Wheaton they still call me Lee.
>
>Namaste,
>
>Liesel

Answer to #1: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is transforming
printed text into ASCII characters that a computer understands.
To transform printed material (e.g., in a book) into
computer-readable form requires three steps in general:

1.  The pages are scanned into a computer.  (The scanner is a
piece of equipment that looks (and acts) vaguely like a copier.
It converts the page into a computer image.)

2.  The scanned image(s) are run through an OCR program, which
locates each character on the scanned image and "recognizes" it
as an "A", "B", "8", or whatever.  It produces "raw"
computer-readable text.

3.  The results of the OCR process are always imperfect, so there
usually is a fairly time-consuming process of editing the OCR
output to make a clean text copy.

Answer to #2: I am a man.  Although some of my best friends are
women ;-)

Regards,
Lee M.