Sandy, is it possible that these apps learn from scanning or not?
Fred Olver
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandratomkins" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 8:24 AM
Subject: Re: Text Grabber and Prizmo have different strengths.
Hi Annie,
It wasn't bad, was it?
In the end, Prizmo took the prize! Text Grabber did well, but Prizmo
dealt best with the columns. However, this was my second shot, the first
showed the half frction for the lemon, but was less good elsewhere. So, why
did it mistake the fraction in one scan and not in the other? Why is it that
when you keep the book in precisely the same position and the lighting the
same, is it that you get differing results? This is, obviously, more to do
with software than the physical nature of scanning. There wasn't much
between the two, but I would suggest that having both apps will afford the
best chance of getting perfect/near perfect scans depending upon the
layout/formatting of the text. Also, if you are away from your StandScan
pro, prizmo is still much easier to use, it is more forgiving of slight
skewing of the text.
Now, i am also interested to see how i can improve on rounded surfaces.
E.G. tins/bottles. Thus far, they prove difficult with tins doing better
than bottles of wine, this is because the diameter of a wine bottle is less
than the usual tin, so less curvature and less distorting of the text.
What is nice here is that we are beginning to speak of more difficult
aspects of scanning and not of the simple stuff which is very doable now
with these apps and the StandScan Pro. I think I have read that you are
awaiting yours? If I am right, please do let us know how you do with recipes
etc, will you? Many people here may not be interested in recipes, but may be
interested in, say, mathematical formulae or scientific symbols etc, getting
good results with recipes will help in working toward this IMHO.
Happy scanning and I could only wish that having scanned a recipe, I
could only get as proficient at actually cooking it!
Sandy.
Sent from my iPhone
On 25 Mar 2013, at 12:35, Annie Skov Nielsen <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi Sandra.
Is this scanning done with textgrabber or prizmo.
I have been scanning books for many years, and I can tell that cookbooks
are the most difficult books to get a sensible result from. I am really
impressed that you can get such results with a IPhone and standscan.
Best regards Annie.
On Mar 25, 2013, at 1:20 PM, Sandratomkins <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
I have just been playing with Text Grabber and Prizmo in conjunction
with my StandScan Pro. I decided to try them with a book that I attempted
to scan many years ago using a flat-bed scanner and Kurtzweil. My
results, possibly, ten or more years ago, were less than satisfactory. In
fact, you couldn't follow the recipes because the quantities were
illegible. Now, in many ways, the apps we have available to us on the
iPhone, are in their infancy. obviously, they are a fraction of the size
of, say, Kurtzweil and, also obviously, a fraction of the price. plus,
now we are dealing with a portable solution. When you want to read a
letter, something simple with no columns etc, both Prizmo and Text
Grabber will do the job, especially when using the StandScan Pro.
However, imbedded columns and symbols for grammes/ounces/fractions etc
can prove daunting for these pocket sized OCR packages. Now that we have
a way to position the phone exactly, and we can ensure perfect lighting
conditions, when things go wrong it is more to do with the scanning/OCR
capability of a given app rather than the physicality of scanning. Also,
there is one other variable: to wit, when we use a flat-bed scanner, the
book we are scanning is facing down onto a flat surface and gravity alone
will heple with ensuring the flatness of the text. Now and again, we may
use pressure on that book to make sure that the text nearest to the spine
is readable. This we cannot do when the book is facing up toward the
phone. So, until apps such as Prizmo or Text Grabber get really clever
and learn to deal with distorted text, we aill always have trouble
scanning two pages of a book, apart from when we are scanning roughly
half way through, because only half way through will allow you to hold
the pages equally flat.
With all this in mind, I tried both Text Grabber and prizmo on my "The
Big Book of Tomatoes". I wanted results that would mean I could follow
the recipes with ease. In the end, for good enough results, I had to use
only single page shots. These pages all have paragraphs of text plus
columns of ingredients. Below is my best result, there are two
significant mistakes, where you will hear 'tilda" it should read "half"
(so half a lemon). Also, when it says "s minutes" it should read 5.
The rest is perfect, it starts wheE. half way through a sentence and
finishes at the bottom, half way through a sentence.
We are getting there, these results are much, much better than those
obtained by me and my expensive Kurtzweil and flat-bed scanner all those
years ago. I do know that kurtzwiel ahs improved since then, but our
phones and OCR apps are catching up fast. The point of all this is to
draw people's attention to the fact that not everything is about the
right position of the phone and the lighting, it is also about software.
So, here it is!
"f Tomato Soups ~ in the yoghurt. Taste and adjust the seasoning with
salt, Tabasco, lemon juice and possibly, depending on the ripeness of the
fruit, a little sugar.
Pick the mint leaves from the stalks and chop very finely. Stir into the
soup. Serve very cold.
HOT SOUPS BLACK BEAN SOUP WITH TOMATO AND
Serves 6-8 AVOCADO RELISH
Black beans, not to be confused with black-eyed beans, are small, shiny
and kidney-shaped. Their slightly sweet flavour is complemented by onions
and garlic, goes well with coriander, cumin and tomatoes, and needs to be
pepped up with chilli. This soup combines all those flavours and the
result is an intriguingly aromatic, thick and chunky soup, freshened with
a 'salad' of raw tomato and avocado seasoned with lemon juice.
4 tbsp vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced 4 garlic c(oves, chopped 1 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp
ground coriander 1 tsp dried oregano 1 bay leaf
250 g dried black beans, soaked in water for at least 4 hours and drained
2 x 400 g tins italian tomatoes for ~he garnish
1 firm but ripe avocado, diced 1 tbsp lemon juice
2 plum tomatoes, cored, peeled, 1 tbsp tomato purde
1 scant tsp Tabasco a large bunch coriander (approximately 75 g), leaves
only, chopped
1.75 litres hot water or vegetable stock
salt and freshly ground black pepper
~,~ lemon
seeded and diced 100 g soured cream
a few coriander leaves Heat the oil in a large pan and saut6 the onion
and garlic for several minutes until slippery but not coloured. Stir in
the cumin, ground coriander, oregano and bay leaf, then add the beans.
Cook, stirring constantly, for S minutes.
Run a sharp knife through the tomatoes a few times while still in the tin
and add them, with their liquid, the tomato pur~e, Tabasco and chopped
coriander and the hot water or stock. Bring to the boil, turn down
immediately and simmer very gently for 3 hours.
Discard the bay leaf. Put& half the soup in a food-processor or
mouli-legumes. Pass the soup through a sieve, pressing down hard, into
Sent from my iPhone
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