OCR

[Konstantin Zaitzev]

I'm glad to inform those who are engaged in digitization of the theosophical books that CuneiForm OCR system is now freeware!
http://www.cuneiform.ru/eng/index.html

Being the second by popularity OCR package in Russia, after Finereader, it was made free for download, like it was previously made so with Mozilla.
Currently it supports of 20 languages.

[Konstantin Zaitzev]

As for Steiner, I know the Russian site where his collected works in German are online: http://bdn-steiner.ru/modules.php?name=Ga

[Ethel]

Will someone help me by telling me what this freeware is and what it does. Is it a page layout software or a marketing tool such a s constant contact or what? i Hve lots of material that needs to be orgnanized and digitized and looking for efficient and economical ways to do it. Thanks for the feedback generated.

[Konstantin Zaitzev]

OCR means optical character recognition. It replaces a typist. When a page from a book is scanned, it is an image, picture (photo copy) with the letters and words "painted", not a text file. To make from it a searcheable or editable text file, like .doc or .html, we need an OCR software. It is not ideal, but the newest versions make no more errors than a human typing on a keyboard (provided that the original page and scanning was of good quality).
In other words, you need a scanner (digital camera works too, but somewhat worse) to scan pages (or image files which were scanned by someone else) and the OCR software which converts them to documents. After processing they need a proof-reading and then they are ready for putting online or republishing.

[Ethel]

Thanks Konstantin. I appreciate the speedy and detailed reply.
Blessed day!