[Coco] Decent OCR for Rainbow code listings

[Aaron Wolfe]

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that I've been having pretty good luck doing
OCR on basic listings from scanned Rainbows.
I'm using ABBYY fine reader, which is the only OCR product I've found
(we have several at my office) which seems to handle the task well.  I
was suprised to find that one the built in recognition languages is
called "Basic". It seems to have an idea of what tokens should be
present which reduces errors a fair bit.

Depending on the scan quality and font used it takes a bit of
training, especially on punctuation, but overall I am impressed with
how easily you can convert scanned images into usable basic code with
this product.  I'm not sure you could use this for assembly since the
columns won't convert to the arrow key presses for edtasm very easily.
Some programs have a second, equivalent listing that uses basic data
statements with a poking loop, and I've had great luck OCRing these.

Combine with the Paste feature in MESS, and "typing in" all those
great old programs is quite fast.  Hope I saved someone some time,
have a great weekend all.

-Aaron