[Coco] Test OCR

[Aaron Wolfe]

2011/4/28 Luis Fernández <luis46coco at hotmail.com>:
>

> Aaron, please listen to me, I want to help, please, compare with cococoging, I'm notcompeting, I just want the best for the community coconut, and I made an advanceinterlock
>

no hay problema

I think Tim's project is the best way to preserve the Rainbow and
other mags like the Hot Coco in the long term.  I think it is the only
way to accurately translate the printed material into digital text.
Unfortunately, it is a huge amount of work, as you are finding out
with your experiments.  Tim's project helps tremendously by splitting
this work up and letting everyone easily spend a little time helping.
I think it's great.

CoCoCoding is a different approach, with different goals and different
results :)  The processing I do on the mags is automated, which puts
it in the realm of what a single person can do with a little spare
time here and there.  The OCR results are much inferior to Tim's
project, with most OCR being so poor that you cannot copy and paste
text without manually editing it.  The goal was never to provide what
Tim's project provides (perfect digital recreation).   Instead, I
wanted to reduce the file sizes for what we already had and improve
the human readability by using ClearScan.  The settings I used were
chosen with these goals in mind, not to produce 100% accurate OCR.
The OCR is simply good enough that when combined with the Google Docs
engine running the cococoding site, you can do reasonably accurate
queries for topics and phrases and see results from lots of mags and
documentation.  It isn't perfect, but it can often answer a question
quickly.. sort of like Google itself.

When Tim's rainbow project is complete, there will probably be no need
for the processed files.  Instead, you can generate perfect PDFs (or
any other format) from the content stored in Tim's database.
CoCoCoding is a temporary attempt to improve things until then.

I hope you can work with Tim and combine efforts, since you both seem
to want the same results.  I will continue to help on Tim's cocomag
site and encourage everyone to consider spending a few minutes now and
then helping out there.

-Aaron