OCR

Had some first hand experience today with OCR or Optical Character Recognition software today. As I told before, my old sprintpcs LG phone died a torturous death under a car. Went around in vain for a couple of days trying to get all the numbers out of the phone book, but it was in too bad shape for them to be recovered.
Then I went back to a old printout from December of a printout of all the nos in my phone that sprint store had given me - that was when i destroyed my previous LG phone! Just had the printout, so digitallly scanned it and created a image pdf version. Then tried a lot of free OCR softwares which gave a very poor recognition performance even of printed text. Finally found a Image2PDF OCR which worked pretty well. It worked well enough except messing up 0/o and 8/g. Got around the fact that they were only doing odd pages in the trial version by a simple trick :-) And cool, I now have a formatted text backup of all my contacts.