Re: OCR software (was Re: Concerning BLinux project (fwd))

["Lloyd G. Rasmussen" <lras@loc.gov>]

What you ask for is not likely to be available until artificial 
intelligence goes forward much further.  You are asking a computer 
program which knows the *presentation* of a document to correctly 
infer the *structure* of that document, or at least attempt to do so.  

I recently bought Omnipage 9 for Win95 from Caere Corporation.  Among 
all its export formats, it includes an HTML export format.  From what 
I've seen so far, the objective is to make a GUI web browser display 
the page, with fonts, italics, centering, intact.  The HTML is  a 
series of <p> and <br> with Font, I, Align attributes.  No structure.  
It even claims to conform to the HTML 3.0 DTD, and tells you that the 
generator is Adobe Word for Word.  I know that HTML is not SGML.  But 
I'm not too hopeful that when OCR programs begin exporting XML, that 
they will do much better than this. 

I know that Duxbury attempts to create styles in a file which it has 
imported from ASCII, but this is usually just a beginning toward 
correctly marking up a document.  I agree that you're aiming for the 
right objective, but I don't know how we're going to get there.

On Mon, 7 Dec 1998 09:28:03 +1100 (AEDT), 
Jason White   <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU> wrote:

>On the subject of freely available OCR software, currently under
>development, see http://www.socr.org/
>
>What is most needed as output is not straightforward ASCII text, but
>rather a document which has been marked up in SGML, XML or a related
>language, that preserves its structure and maintains the distinctions
>necessary for the generation of high quality braille and audio output.
>
>
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-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       lras@loc.gov    http://www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) lras@sprynet.com http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/lras/