> First, optical character recognition is hit and miss.

Not any more!

I have used ABBY Finereader for years. Well worth whatever they charge.  It
both OCRs and converts to a Word Doc., a spreadsheet, or a pdf that combines
the original image with the OCRed text. This works perfectly with the pdfs
of older multipage documents that are unsearchable "image pdfs", converting
them to full-text searchable pdfs with the same images on each page, so you
lose nothing.  I've never had the slightest problem with this software, and
I live in a "paperless" environment.  Everything, save books and journals,
are scanned, and then shredded except for what we keep in the safe deposit
box and our travel documents.  (She's never once complained about sticky
doorknobs, propolis on faucet handles, or any of the other domestic
drawbacks of beekeeping, so I can at least keep the paper clutter down to
one stack of still-unread journals and two stacks of books not yet shelved.
Of course, with 10-foot ceilings...)

For pages from printed books, receipts, invoices, anything that comes in the
mail, the Google Drive scan widget (the icon is a camera) is just amazing.
You have to fiddle with it and set it to "full color" "greyscale" or "black
and white" to get an optimal image, but the OCR is what you'd expect from
Google's project to scan eleventy-seven million books.  Very good.  You can
quickly crop and define the corners of the thing you scanned to correct any
odd angles ("tombstoning", we used to call it on CRT displays).  What you
scan is then uploaded to Google Drive, and you can then use their "Google
synch" product to automagically get them onto your workstation.   I even
used this to grab some text from something I was reading on my Kindle to
email, as it was easier to do than to walk to my PC. 

The "lens" feature, built into the Google Pixel phone cameras, and soon
available for any phone's camera with the "GCAM" camera app, can also OCR
text on the fly straight into the clipboard of the phone.  The fun part is
that it also translates on the fly, a big help when traveling.  So menus and
signs are suddenly perfectly comprehensible anywhere, and saved so you can
remember what that dish was called for amateur-hour cooking when back home.
So, things like European train station names are easy to remember,
understand, and properly pronounce, for example - Spittal-Millstattersee
(Spit Mill Scattergun), Horni Dvoriste (Horny Divorcee), Cesky Krumlov
(Crispy Kreme), and Ceske Budejovice  (Kiss Beetlejuice) from Austria into
Czechia.  Takes all the stress out of travel.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html