You're absolutely right, ath, that's probably a bit open-ended. And there are definitely tradeoffs. I'll try to zoom in a bit more to a specific likely scenario. (And I also emphasized my question in the original post, so it doesn't get lost in the verbage!)
Let's say we want to be able to do it with hardware/software combos in the $100-$600 range (not including the PC, of course) . And let's say that we don't want to spend more than 3-4 "attended" man hours on the whole operation... prepping, scanning, OCR and creating the text file for a 500 page book.
Any unattended time, say overnight unattended processing, would not count in the time requirement.
Is this possible, or still a bit out of the reach of current technology?
|