OCR and Google Docs
OCR (optical character recognition) is used to convert paper books into a computer editable document. Google offers an experimental feature in wich one can upload a scanned document, perform OCR on it and then edit the resulting document on Google Documents. That feature is available on the Google Data API (Import Scans) and there’s also a live demo.
To try the live demo you just need a Google Account and a high resolution PNG, JPEG or GIF image that weights less than 10MB. I tried it using a high-resolution screenshot of the first two parragraphs from the last post. This was the result:
My test returned a few errors and for what I’ve seen the Google OCR service is not yet reliable, but at Google they are constantly improving their services, just two days ago they announced a new ability to upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB, so let’s keep an eye on their OCR system.
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