Re: tlug: Applixware and printers and OCR

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com> writes:

    Dennis> On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> The only excuses I have for using Windows any more are (1)
    >> colleagues who insist on sending me Word/Wordperfect/Excel
    >> docs, and (2) Japanese OCR.

    Dennis>   I have looked around the net a bit, without really
    Dennis> finding much info on English OCR for Lignux/Unix.  What is
    Dennis> recommended?

Dunno; I just use the Japanese package (Winreader Pro) in eigo mode.
I haven't looked for OCR for GNU/Linux in a long time, but I recall
vaguely having seen something about a free package once a long time
ago, probably on the DJGPP (GCC for DOS) list.

    Dennis>   Is there really nothing usable in the way of 'free'
    Dennis> Japanese OCR for Lignux?  It's not a society that exactly
    Dennis> encourages much non-commercial enterprise, though, is it?

Be fair now:  Mule?  Canna?  Wnn (up to v4.2)?  SKK?  The Wadalab
fonts?  (Have you looked at the proliferation of `H' web pages
recently?  I can't say I approve, but it _is_ enterprise and much of
it is more or less `free'.)  On the other hand, a lot of the
development that is going on in the GNU community these days is quite
commercial, even though the software itself is contributed:
Ghostscript, RedHat, Cygnus, etc.

Consider the scale of the software projects I mentioned.  Then think,
it's _much_ harder to do recognition than creating fonts; I don't find
it surprising at all that there isn't a free Japanese OCR.  English
only has to handle a couple of hundred glyphs, really.  Japanese needs
at least 4000.

I do think it's an interesting question of whether Japan could support 
companies like Aladdin, RedHat, and Cygnus which provide full-blown
documented products for free, and make their living on service.
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