[iBook] Off topic? Audio and OCR help wanted

[joe]

On Nov 12, 2006, at 2:54 PM, Brian Olesky wrote:

>
>>>
>>> You can simply scan the recipes, and then use the Mac's built  
>>> in .pdf
>>> reader, Preview, to select and extract whatever text you want from
>>> the scans
>>> and import it into any other program you like, such as Word, and
>>> then work
>>> with it any way you choose. No extra tools, or expense required. It
>>> works
>>> extremely well (at least the way I use it).
>> Thanks, Brian. Does the Mac OS have a built in OCR capability, to
>> render a scan searchable? He wants to build a database (again, I'm
>> not sure if this is possible) of these recipes, all searchable. Are
>> we talking about FileMaker Pro or something else or something built
>> into the Mac? With Spotlight, this function is kind of there, no?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> mark
>>
> Not sure about that. All I ever do in the area you're discussing is  
> scan
> documents and select sections for inputting their text into my Word  
> docs. I
> don't even use database softwear.
Sounds like Brian is using some kind of OCR that's part of his  
scanner software.  I'm pretty sure there's nothing in Preview that  
could take text out of a PDF if said text is just an embedded image.   
Mark is right--you need some OCR software somewhere to make the  
scanned recipes into text.  It sounds like the recipe project won't  
be something you can fully automate--I'm guessing the recipes aren't  
in a standard format, so you'll have do some copy and pasting of text  
into whatever db you set up.  (Filemaker would work fine for that--or  
a dedicated recipe program.  Or you could probably find a nice recipe  
template for Filemaker.)

Joe