MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - You can make ebooks with the darndest things

DawnFalcon · 01-23-2010, 08:19 AM

It's software, Nate. It's taking a scan and passing it directly to a PDF printer built into the software on your PC, sometimes via bundled OCR software. So yea, I'd be surprised as well if new printers are coming without it, because it is just software - and once you've built the software, the cost of bunding it with all your printers is marginal.

I bought a (£60 RRP, although I got it a lot cheaper) HP multifunction printer recently, and it's software can OCR-process a document and produce a "readable PDF" with OCR'ed text, or just process the text and produce rtf, txt or html.

It's not perfect by a long shot, but it is good at getting the text off letters and other printed text.

01-23-2010, 08:19 AM	#4
DawnFalcon Banned Posts: 2,094 Karma: 2682 Join Date: Aug 2009 Device: N/A	It's software, Nate. It's taking a scan and passing it directly to a PDF printer built into the software on your PC, sometimes via bundled OCR software. So yea, I'd be surprised as well if new printers are coming without it, because it is just software - and once you've built the software, the cost of bunding it with all your printers is marginal. I bought a (£60 RRP, although I got it a lot cheaper) HP multifunction printer recently, and it's software can OCR-process a document and produce a "readable PDF" with OCR'ed text, or just process the text and produce rtf, txt or html. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it is good at getting the text off letters and other printed text.