31 Jan
2005
31 Jan
'05
5:22 a.m.
"Simon Peyton-Jones"
What would OCR buy us? Searching, I guess, which is a fantastic plus. Anything else?
- The ability to cut and paste passages into e.g. e-mail. - Availability for text-only access - e.g. for the vision impaired, or people on low bandwidth connections. - Possibility of re-typesetting it with e.g. LaTeX, to make nice-looking reprints on a laserprinter in your neighborhood. Basically, making the text (and not just pictures of it) available empowers its users in a general way -- not unlike publishing the source code to e.g. GHC. (I'm going to have to read it, just on principle :-) -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants