Ignore this, it's boring.

[Bouncy Ball]

Unless you have advice.

I asked about this earlier and have been wrestling with it ever since.

I have 43 pages of documents. They are about three years old. The woman who originally created them (they are table documents done in Word) is long gone and she took the disk with her and it's not on the server.

So, we need to make revisions to these documents. I scanned in several pages and found out, thanks to some great DUers, that I need OCR software in order to convert the image files into text files. I found out that my scanning software HAS the capability to convert images to text.

So I did it. It worked on the very first page. Well, when I say "worked" I mean it took another 15 minutes of cleaning up the crap it converted incorrectly (weird characters everywhere), fixing margins and misspellings that happened in the conversion, etc. But not too bad. DEFINITELY less time than re-typing the whole damn page.

BUT, it only worked for that first page. I tried converting the next scanned image (page two) and it converted, but with big chunks of the image left as images. #%&$*%(#$*#@&(

So I tried downloading a demo of some OCR software off the internet and it converted it, but all the letters were made up of tinier letters (does that make sense?). Don't know how to get around that.

I can't stand this. This HAS to work, or we're looking at paying someone $25 an hour to re-type every frigging page. If we do go that direction, I think we'll do it in fucking Excel, anyway. Easier to make changes to.

I'll figure it out. Thanks for reading this, if you did.

:grr:

[progmom]

1. that sounds so frustrating

especially after that first page got your hopes up. x(

[Bouncy Ball]

2. That's exactly it!

I even emailed my boss after the first page, all victorious and happy and now I'm going to have to email her with "sorry, premature elation!"

I'm ready to tear my hair out, I am. SIX hours on this. Well, on this and other stuff, but I keep coming back to it, hoping it will miraculously work this time. I was even willing to do some good juju dance or something.

[progmom]

4. that beats my computer frustrations today

I put on some good music and tackled the dreadful work of planning purchases, sales, returns, discounts and margin for the next 6 months at work. Got an hour into an excel file and my computer decided to reboot. I was working in a shared drive and had not yet thought to save the spreadsheet to my hard drive. It was all gone. :cry:

[LynzM]

3. Um....

I'll do it for $18/hr? :) (Well, I would, I type fast, too)

I'm sorry it didn't work. Have you tried to figure out what's different between the first and second pages, or if you did anything differently when you tried scanning the second page? Page orientation? Settings in the program? Anything like that?

[Bouncy Ball]

5. Yep, I did all that.

I cropped the image on the first page, so I did it to the second page, too (it needed it, too). So then I tried NOT cropping a page. I looked at all the settings. I looked at everything.

Then I thought "Hey! Maybe it was the way I was sitting!"

So I tucked my right leg under my left leg and sat in the chair like that. Nothing.

Superstitious computer user here.

[LynzM]

9. Hrm....

That does extra-suck, then. I hate it when computers do stuff like that, and you can't figure out why. Briarius is much better at having computer-patience than I am. I'd be all huffy and griping at it...

I'm serious about the offer if you do end up needing someone to type them up, BTW.

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. I think you should go have sex, and then come back

and attack the problem afresh.

[Bouncy Ball]

7. Hmmm.

I hadn't tried that yet.

:7

[Rabrrrrrr]

8. Sometimes if you can eliminate the stress in your body and mind,

that really helps.

At least, when you can't physically eliminate the cause of the stress.

[Bouncy Ball]

11. It would involve waking the mister up.

But that's not something he would mind.

Look at you turning my computer thread into a sex thread!

:rofl:

I'll say something, you did make me laugh! Thank you!

[sundog]

10. Ignored! and hidden!

so there :P

[Bouncy Ball]

12. Hidden my ass!

:D

:hug:

[sundog]

13. i didn't even see that

:P

:hug:

[iconoclastic cat]

14. Give a temp some work!

Or get a grad student to do it. Or a student teacher!

[Bouncy Ball]

15. Just tried different demo of OCR software.

It toyed with me. It removed all image chunks, but fucked up the text even more. My daughter peered over my shoulder and asked if it was Japanese.

Might as well be.

Sigh. Thanks everyone. Screw it (for tonight).

Iconoclast, we just might end up doing that. At least I have one that converted correctly, we can just copy and paste the same table over and over and just change the words inside, so it's not TOO bad, I guess.

For all this technology nowdays, you'd think.....

[Floogeldy]

16. I think you should change your job description to "Typist."

:)

[Bouncy Ball]

17. Possibly.

:D