I had to recover a “legacy” document the other day which I only had a paper copy of. My typing skills aren’t bad until I have to look at a document rather than the screen or my fingers.

I often wish like an ex-girlfriend of mine I’d decided to learn to type properly – and before I get replies about how quick you are at bashing out lines of I’m talking about typing proper sentences that are on a sheet of paper next to you! I scored 61wpm with 1 mistake on this typing challenge which I don’t think’s too bad. And yes, I’m sure those of you with hummingbirds for fingers will be able to p*** on that. Anyway, she used to be able to type pages fault free nearly quicker than I could read them! I’d remembered that Clarky had looked in OCR technologies for a previous engagement and he recommended AABBYY Fine Reader as a good one.

I scanned in a few pages of the document to try out and it was pretty good (with a lot fewer mistakes than my typing). There were some pages that were an abject failure, including a flow chart that I had little hope of recovering anyway (and can be inserted as a GIF anyway), but most of them were on pages with smaller fonts. This might have worked better with a better scanner than the primitive one I was using. The only other real issues I found were some slightly quirky behaviour on bullet lists (didn’t recognise them), tables (where is made the tables but sometimes didn’t have a border on the LH side), and also occasional replacement of Ws with Vs (e.g. “Vat does this mean?”) so that the document sometimes looked like a bad ’Allo ’Allo script.

The software is fairly cheap at 89 quid for the download version and I’d be pretty tempted to convert the trial edition to the full version if I thought I wouldn’t begin OCR-ing inappropriate and irrelevant documents just for the hell of it (probably the modern day equivalent of labelling everything with Dymo tape machines) or testing it out on everybody’s handwriting.