Hello Marcia, The idea is that you scan a document and then use an OCR program to recognise the letters in the PICTURE of the document. The OCR program then stores the TEXT as a file that you can word process put into a database, spreadsheet or whatever you'd normally do with some text. The catch is of course that none of the OCR programs get it 100% correct so you have to check it all. With regard to fische my idea was to scan a fische (e.g. St. Catherine's Index) at very high resolution 1200dpi or better and then run it through an OCR program to get data files. The next step would be to get lots of people to do the same and publish the text on their websites in a Webring. It wouldn't take too long before the whole thing was out there in cyberspace waiting to be looked at by people like us. This would remove the need to travel to the locations of the fische and also the whole Index would be searchable by computer! A by-product is that automatic indexing of census results should be achievable. Whilst this sounds very good there appear to be problems. The OCR I've tried on photocopies of a Census from fische was not too successful and the magnification of the scanner may not be enough. I'm still thinking about it though. Anyway the World Cup is about to start! Cheers Joe de la Poer Power marcia collins wrote: > Hi, I must have missed this first post re:fische and OCR, do you still have > it? I have a question on Can I scan a document, use an OCR and the be able > to sort it on a page? > > -----Original Message----- > From: joe.power <joe.power@which.net> > To: GenTips-L@rootsweb.com <GenTips-L@rootsweb.com> > Date: Tuesday, June 09, 1998 8:35 PM > Subject: Re: microfische > > >Its funny you should mention this because there has been a discussion about > the use of scanner technology in conjunction with Optical Character > Recognition software to do > >exactly this. We haven't worked it out yet but it would really be > something if it could work. > > > >Joe de la Poer Power > > > >corbet@ix.netcom.com wrote: > > > >> Hi there. I was just wondering if there was an easy way to transfer data > from microfische to bytes on the computer? Any sugesstions gratefully > entertained. Thanx, Corbet > >> > >> ==== GenTips Mailing List ==== > >> Are you having trouble unsubscribing to the list? You can subscribe and > unsubscribe to the lists we own from our web page at: > >> http://www.genrecords.com > > > > > > > > > > > >==== GenTips Mailing List ==== > >Are you having trouble unsubscribing to the list? You can subscribe and > unsubscribe to the lists we own from our web page at: > >http://www.genrecords.com > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >