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readingaloud · 02-22-2007, 04:51 AM

Getting the exposure right makes all the difference!

I fed my system a 700-page novel last night. The introduction, which was set in a light face, was too light, and had so many errors that I'll have to re-scan it. But the main body of the novel, scanned at 400 dpi, was amazing--I kept a tally part of the time as I proofed it, and for one 100-page section, I had 383 words flagged for review, and only 18 OCR errors!--that's less than one in every five pages. I actually made 21 corrections, however: the system flagged 3 things that were typos in the printed book.

Part of what's happening is that the book was printed better than the others I've tried, and it didn't have zillions of double quotation marks, ellipses, and em-dashes, or extended passages set italic, all of which seem to drive OmniPage nuts.

But I think that one of the main reasons to use a SnapScan for this purpose is to make it easy to rescan. Getting the exposure right makes all the difference, but if the scanning process is a pain in the neck, you're more likely to grit your teeth and work with the bad images.

02-22-2007, 04:51 AM	#10
readingaloud Enthusiast Posts: 34 Karma: 55 Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Switzerland Device: iRex iLiad; Sony Reader; Amazon Kindle	get the exposure right! Getting the exposure right makes all the difference! I fed my system a 700-page novel last night. The introduction, which was set in a light face, was too light, and had so many errors that I'll have to re-scan it. But the main body of the novel, scanned at 400 dpi, was amazing--I kept a tally part of the time as I proofed it, and for one 100-page section, I had 383 words flagged for review, and only 18 OCR errors!--that's less than one in every five pages. I actually made 21 corrections, however: the system flagged 3 things that were typos in the printed book. Part of what's happening is that the book was printed better than the others I've tried, and it didn't have zillions of double quotation marks, ellipses, and em-dashes, or extended passages set italic, all of which seem to drive OmniPage nuts. But I think that one of the main reasons to use a SnapScan for this purpose is to make it easy to rescan. Getting the exposure right makes all the difference, but if the scanning process is a pain in the neck, you're more likely to grit your teeth and work with the bad images.