Well, strange things can happen in the OCR world. I'm not at all surprised
that the scanner got the word 100th at moth," particularly in light of a
"printed" memo I received one day years ago at work. It was a Thanksgiving
wish from the U.S. President to all government employees. I could not believe
what it "said" as rendered by OpenBook, so I looked at the page with my
Optacon.
One portion was supposed to say, "...wish you a Happy Thanksgiving." When I
looked at it with my Optacon I saw that the "a" was of a font that has the
lowercase "a" similar to the lowercase "o" except that the lower right-hand
portion of the "a" is rather squared off compared to the "o". Since for some
reason, the right corner of that letter was somewhat dim, OpenBook took it as a
lowercase "o". The first "p" was missing much of the lower right-hand portion
of the letter, so OpenBook entered a "r." the next "p" was really messed up:
enough was faint and missing on the bottom curve and desender to cause OpenBook
to take it as a "n," then the "y" came through well enough to be properly
decoded.
Any adult on this list will probably figure out the word I got without my
putting it in here. When I showed the "printed page" to a coworker, he and his
friends also saw what I had gotten on the screen, and we all laughed. He then
"wised me up" on what had happened. The original text had been printed by the
author; he faxed it to all of the offices to which it should go. They scanned
it into the email software we ran; since my screen reader wouldn't read it, I
printed it and scanned it into OpenBook. My coworker laughed and told me that
I was lucky to even get something that made sense in view of the history of the
document I had. He also told me that the copies that my coworkers had were of
very poor quality; again, he was surprised that I got anything out of it. Of
course, it had several other errors, but the one I described above got the most
laughter in our office! I learned from that experience that one must be
watchful when reading something whose transmission history you do not know.
-----Original Message-----
From: optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf
Of Ben Mustill-Rose
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2021 5:28 AM
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: A question
Hi,
Visually o and 0 look fairly similar so that explains the o's. I've never heard
of 1 being interpreted as m before but that's almost certainly what happened.
Cheers,
Ben.
On 1/10/21, Robert Feinstein <harlynn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Listers, this is Bob from New York. I was reading something with myto view the list archives, go to:
scanner and it read "we are celebrating our moth birthday." I found
that strange, and re-scanned. Got the same results. Looked at the
page with my optacon and it said "celebrating our 100th birthday.
Totally clear. I am just curious: why would a scanner read moth
instead of 100th? I usually can figure out why an error occurs, but this
time I'm stymied.
Just curious.
Hope all of you are well and using your optacons. Bob
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