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David Neeley responded to my comment that "OCR of really crisp scans
easily exceeds 99% accuracy nowadays, but that's not as good as it
sounds; it still means one error roughly every 20 words. Budget time
for proofreading to catch typos.": <<I have gotten *much* better
accuracy than you suggest.>>
A clarification: I said "easily exceeds 99%", not "only hits 99% on a
good day".
<<A dozen years ago, the early versions of OmniPage were seeing about 2
or 3 errors per page of xerographically reproduced printed pages, and
TypeReader was even better.>>
Then you were getting much better results than PC Magazine was getting
only a few years back. The rates have unquestionably improved, no doubt
about it, particularly with high-quality scans and source material. My
only purpose in citing that number was that it's a simple calculation
(1 error in 100 characters @ 5 characters per word = 1 error in every
20 words; @500 words per page, that amounts to 25 errors per page), not
to suggest that you should inevitably expect that many errors.
In fact, the improved accuracy of more modern OCR software carries a
subtle danger: After reading most of a page or even a few pages and
finding no errors, it's very tempting to assume the software did a
perfect job and to stop checking. Not a wise strategy, but who said we
humans were always wise? This is why God invented editors and
proofreaders...
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