I remember, when I was in my teens or early twenties, going with my mother to her secretarial office to help her scan some documents. The scanner was the size of a small car. But it could do two-sided OCR scans. It even had a screen, and when it hit a word that didn’t scan right, it would beep and you could correct the word on the screen. I was impressed.
Decades later, scanners have gotten smaller, but the OCR function is still a bit hinky. With a side of random. So, sometimes the letter l would scan as — the letter l. And sometimes it would be a number 1. An r next to an n might scan as the letter m. Et cetera. Not to mention the random glitches that put in curly lines and out of place punctuation.
It was a good thing I had planned to do a careful line edit. And I must admit that having to be on the lookout for random typos made me pay very close attention (magnification at 250%, and revealed character marks and all).
My eyes were red and sore after three days of editing. But the book was ready for uploading. Almost.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about the next hurdle — proper format. Not as easy as it sounds, and every outlet wants a different format.
Kelly
Kelly is a writer, a mom, and a reading tutor for children with dyslexia. Plus, she is totally addicted to her iPad. Curse you, Steve Jobs.
for scanning jobs and the recognition of your files you can always use services like http://www.bookscanning.com . If you do check your documents youself you will always see that the recognition software has problems to differenciate for instance between the letter S and the number 5 or the number 0 and the letter O. sometimes is the use of scanning services a cheaper alternative.
True. But when I first do something, I am a bit of a control freak. A complaining control freak, but….