I am going back to a job I surveyed right at the start of my business.
I have the coordinates from the original survey printed out in comma delimited format.
Are any of you aware of a way to use some sort of optical recognition to scan the page and spit out an ASCII list of the coordinates?
TIA
JB,
My Brother 6490? has OCR on it and I've had great luck with it, and zero luck with it. I think my coord lists that were printed as dot matrix have not has as good luck as some others that I've tried to convert. It will scan the page and print to a .txt file which can be pulled into about any system as an ascii file.
IF you do try it, it should be pretty noticeable if it worked or not. When it works, it's great, when it doesn't, it looks like pure jibberish.
You'll probably want to double check your traverse and property corner coord's as a double check to see if they scanned right, but other than that, I don't know what to tell ya.
Good luck!
Carl
I do not know of any.I have in the past, just manually input into my system.
I've been able to use the pro version of Adobe Reader to convert point tables from scans of old engineering drawings to an excel spreadsheet. From excel, save to a 'csv' file.
I got it to work.
Scanned paper copy of coord list into PDF.
Select "save file as" drop down menu to xlm spreadsheet.
Open new xml spreadsheet. Tweak cells.
Select "save as other" then select CSV (MS-DOS).
Open in wordpad for further tweakage.
BAM! Goes right in.
For future reference....
http://www.onlineocr.net/
Works well, but one page at a time.
OCR capability is a one of many good reasons to own Acrobat Standard.
Documents that were printed to pdf (as opposed to scanned pieces of paper) can be opened as editable text in the latest editions of MS Word.
And to think of all those hours I spent as a youth hand entering then checking pages of dot matrix printed coordinates.
I still remember the distinctive sound of the printer and folding the print out up to strip the edges.
I ran into a couple of unopened boxes of this paper in the supply cabinet not long back...
decided to keep it next to the unopened box of 3.5" floppy disks...:pinch:
> Ok Paden,
>
> Remember these?
> If someone is going to show their floppy, then it might as well be an 8" floppy....
> 
Oh, so very, very well.
We had a TRS-80 Mod. II(commonly referred to as a Trash 80) that used the 8" floppy. In 1981 I paid $600 for a hydraulic analysis program for the Tandy. We needed to provide a Hardy Cross for new potable water lines on a military base. Keep in mind a brand spankin' new Lietz BT-20 transit cost $1200. Coughing up "that much" for software seemed crazy at the time....
I can't remember how many of those floppies we filled up..or how many reams of paper we printed for that flow analysis. But it paid good. We paid off the equipment and bought me a new 1981 Ford F-100 pickup for the field.
I was squattin' in tall cotton back then...B-)
For future reference....
> http://www.onlineocr.net/
> Works well, but one page at a time.
That's awesome - thanks! Worked like a charm.
One quick tip when doing this is if the paper is clean and white, scan in black and white instead of grayscale. That will help the OCR.
Another tip on troublesome sheets is to also try scanning in several different settings, try black and white, and also grayscale. Setup a spreadsheet that subtracts the values of one sheet from the other. Look at the resultant cells for non-zero values, and that will help show you where the program had trouble with reading a value.
In the end I always double checked by hand though, tedious, but at least you are not keying in the coordinates.