OCR

[Jon Pruente]

Anyone ever wonder why banks still use magnetic ink to print the
characters on your checks?  Because they print in a very specific font
and don't rely on a computer analyzing the picture of a character to
figure out what it is - magnetic ink is proven and reliable.  OCR is a
long running problem.  I used to play with it way back in the day
(like, '94 or '95-ish) on my old Packard Bell laptop.  It was slow as
sin, but it sort of worked.  AFAIK, things have generally only gotten
faster due to CPU speed, not really much better at actually
deciphering text.  If all your papers printed in a very OCR friendly
font with strong contrast of ink to paper your accuracy rates would be
good, but they will never be 100%, of course.  So, OCR is truly a
lossy format.  Every OCR setup I've ever bothered to read about still
needs a proof reader.  If a person still has to read, understand and
verify every page that is scanned in you still have a load of man
hours to deal with just getting the stuff in the system.  A good data
entry clerk would be a fair match for a proof reader, I'd wager. ;)

Jon.