I've run into that situation too, with listings so difficult that even a
commercial OCR program (FineReader) couldn't handle it. At the time Tesseract
was far less capable, though I haven't tried it recently to see if that has
changed.
Anyway, my experience was that the task was hard enough that it needed someone
with knowledge of the material. It may be a contract typist could do a
tolerable job but I have my doubts. Typing, say, an obsolete assembly language
program if you see it merely as a random collection of characters is going to
produce more errors than if the person doing the typing actually understands
what the material means.
One consideration is the effort required to repair transcription errors. Those
that produce syntax errors aren't such an issue; those that pass the assembler
or compiler but result in bugs (say, a mistyped register number) are harder to
find.
paul
> On Jan 22, 2022, at 8:57 PM, Mark Kahrs via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> No, OCR totally fails on olde line printer listing. At least the ones I've
> tried (tesseract, online, ...)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 8:06 PM Ethan O'Toole <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Can the listings be OCR'ed?
>>
>> - Ethan
>>
>>
>>> Has anyone ever used Amazon Mechanical Turk to employ typists to type in
>>> old listings of lost code?
>>>
>>> Asking for a friend.
