If you mean the problem of an OCR problem wanting to thread the columns you
need to use an application that has the option to turn off the columnizing.
Arkenstone OpenBook (and some other OCR applications) have this option. You
wouldn't want to have your phone bill read to you threaded. i.e. one column at
a time. You want it to read one horizontal line at a time. Then you would hear
the date, then the description and finally the amount, then down to the next
line. You certainly wouldn't want to hear all the dates then all the
descriptions and then the amounts. This issue is controlled by the software
rather than a function of the scanner itself. The scanner merely takes a
picture of the document and the OCR software interprets it. I hope this helps.

At 10:55 AM 3/13/99 -0500, Sandy Norwood wrote:
>Thank you for the informative article on scanners.  I'm hoping that someone
>can answer a question I have about scanners that wasn't brought up in the
>article.  When I was at the blind rehabilitation center  2 years ago, they
>mentioned that scanners have a hard time with columns of numbers.  Has anyone
>else heard of that and if so do you know if there are manufacturers who have
>solved the problem?
>
>
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Marty Tibor
1 Stop Speech Recognition and Adaptive Technology Synapse
3095 Kerner Blvd., Suite S, San Rafael, CA  94901
toll-free 888-285-9988
http://www.synapseadaptive.com
Providers of adaptive and assistive technology solutions.
http://www.unixspeech.com
UNIX, mainframe and Mac speech recognition
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm
Synapse hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information Pages


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
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