MIGRAPH OCR SOFTWARE    


				by Keith Antoine



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   About Easter this year I received a letter from Migraph in the States
  informing me that they were releasing their OCR software for my Golden
  Image Scanner, which uses the Migraph Touch-Up software for scanning and
  image processing. This was something I had been waiting for, for some long
  time, so to cut a long story short I sent my money US$299 on the 21st of
  April. The service was first class as I received the goods on the 7th May
  and eagerly opened the packing to find two disks and an instruction manual
  of 58 pages. The manual is easy to read and simple in its instructions
  (this is one of the best manuals I have used) and the two disks are
  labelled Master and Support. The Master disk has the Migraph OCR, Read Me
  Now and an excellent Installation program which requires at least 2Mb free
  on the harddrive; the support has a demoIFF for the tutorial plus lexicons.


				  WHAT IS OCR ?

   OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and what it does is, with the
  use of a scanner, import text as an IFF format file (this one also
  supports TIFF and IMG). At this point everything else is done behind the
  scenes, and essentially what happens is that the programme then turns this
  "PICTURE" of some text into an ASCII file of the same text; which in turn
  may be imported into a Wordprocessor/TextEditor to be altered, printed or
  whatever just as if you had typed the script in yourself.

   Now this is POWER - can you imagine not having to type documents in, but
  just scan, save, process, edit and print? What a blessing, especially if
  you are a one finger typist like me. According to the manual there are
  four steps the programme goes through after getting the picture and they
  are:-
  Line Segmentation
  Word and Character Segmentation
  Character recognition
  Text Output.
  No1 splits the lines up, No2 isolates each word and separates each letter,
  No3 extracts the charactaristics of each shape, compares them to a Lexicon
  file and gives each one a name, and No3 converts the recognized file for
  import to a wordprocessor etc.


				   USING OCR

   Migraph OCR is pretrained in about 20 typefaces and can be trained to
  recognise more. It also recognises American and European, character sets as
  well as proportional and monospaced fonts, typeset, typewritten, laser
  printed, and NLQ dot matrix and cover the most used character point sizes
  of 10-18.

   What it will not do is read dense or kerned italic typefaces,
  skewed text or scans that are too light or dark. Essentially this means
  use a FlatBed scanner or make a frame up for your hand held scanner so as
  the scans are straight and as perfect as possible. You also require at
  least 2Mb of Fast RAM and a hard disk - it is possible to do without the
  hard disk if you have about 4Mb of RAM but it is long and laborious. With
  a hand scanner you can only scan in Landscape most of the time but the
  software has an append so as the various scans can be joined together to
  make up the document.  90% of your scans will be in 300 DPI, however if the
  text is say smaller than 9 point then you can scan at 400. The control
  panel which you work from within the program gives you complete control
  over all the functions and learning processes, plus you may scan in
  English, German, French and Dutch and have all the particulars to that
  language recognised.

				  CONCLUSION

   I am sure that there are many who own a computer who could use this great
  piece of software, and when you come to think of the time it will save, it
  must be the greatest thing since sliced bread. There is not a great deal
  more I can tell you about OCR as most is invisible. apart from the setting
  of parameters which once set will not normally need to be altered. It is
  only when the document is in its final stages of processing that the
  programme goes through its LEARNING stage and any interaction is necessary.
  It is only then that previosly unknown characters or badly deformed
  characters are shown to you for recognition and alteration if necessary.
  The Migraph company is the only source for the program at the moment and
  also for the update to their Touch-Up programmme version 2.65. [Ed: Not
  true now - Pactronics bring it in and it can be ordered from us at
  Megadisc. RRP is $795 for scanner and OCR software together.]
  Migraph INC, 32700 Pacific Highway S.(12), Federal Way, WA 98000,USA PH
  0011 1 206 838 4677 from 9-5 and they are about 16 hours behind us. Any
  post office will supply you with an AMEX money order in US$ plus 6.10
  service fee.



   I have just received an update to Migraph OCR software namely version 1.1
  which has some behind the scenes improvements well apart from the GUI
  (graphic user interface) now in the WB2 format. The most important is the
  ability to send the resultant file directly to your favorite texteditor,
  and dialog windows have drag bars.




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