[cctalk] Re: OCR and line printers

That's quite a cleaen listing, actually, cleaner than most I have worked with and dramatically better than some. The sort of slightly-damaged characters that appear should be no problem at all for the "training" feature of ABBYY Fine Reader to deal with. What you'd have to do is run a number of pages through it in training mode, so it sees a number of variations of the individual characters. And as I mentioned, you'd do all the scanning in the mode where it only accepts what it was trained with, no "builtin" patterns. That way it won't make up stuff that isn't part of the character set but happens to match something built-in, like a pound-sterling sign. It may be that scanning the listing as a table (with the various columns as table columns) will work well, and give you the layout explicitly. Or it can be scanned as plain text, but in that case the spacing will mostly turn into individual spaces and you'd need post-processing to insert tabs etc. to make it look right again. Given the simple assembler syntax involved that sort of post-processing would not be hard. paul