OCR

[Billy Crook]

Meant to send this out last night, but apparently it got stuck in drafts...

OCR will never be perfect.  And because of that, you will *never know*
for sure, where it failed.  Once something becomes paper, all it is,
is an image. I have never heard of OCR being a format of its own.
It's usually used to 'convert' an image into text, stored as text, or
convert an image stored as text, put into tags, stored with the image.

I have been storing all my tax and other documents electronically
since 2004.  I currently store scannedd documents in PDF format.  I
would prefer a multipage image format like TIFF, but haven't found a
good program to do that.  PDF is massively more popular.

If I can get an electronic copy from the sender I keep that and ditch
the paper.  Most banks and financial institutions now offer some form
of electronic document delivery because it saves them money.  This is
usually PDF; Sometimes html.  I believe the fewer format
transformations I do on it, the better, so I will save it in whatever
format I can get it in.  If for ANY reason you think you need to print
something out just to scan it in, don't.  Use CupsPDF or PDF-Print, or
something like it.  It shows up as a printer in cups, and when you
print to it, saves a pdf of what you "printed".

If I have to scan paper, I currently use a program called gscan2pdf.
It runs the scanner and can save a multipage pdf file.  Before you
save, you have the chance to re-arrange the page order, which is handy
if your ADF (automatic document feeder) skips a page, or jams.  You
can also rotate pages.  My scanner is attached to the network, so if
you remind me the day before, I can load it up, and demo the program
at the lug meeting.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 9:22 PM, bewkard <bewkard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have finally had it with paperwork.  This last tax season did me in.
>
> I've talked to a couple people about using OCR to store documents digitally.
> I know that a few people on the list do this as well.  I was wondering if
> anyone could give me some tips about what works and what doesn't work.  Is
> it better to OCR things?  is it better to scan and save a PDF or some other
> portable document?
>
> Again, TIA
>
> Tim
>
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