*IMPORTANT* OCR and the AWOL docs (pass by if you're sick of hearing)

[complain jane]

The OCR theory...

I know a lot of us want to drop the story but for those still interested, I do think this is important info to bear in mind. A freeper I do battle with online already seems to have a response to this and his response is BULLSHIT so apparently the idea's already been circulated and disinformation's been cast to counter it.

I think something very important was brought up yesterday by an Air America caller regarding the creation of those documents. A thread had been started here yesterday or the day before and I searched for it but it looks like it's gone.

If you had an old document that was typed on a typewriter, but wanted
to have a record of it as a text document in a computer, you could either:

1. Scan the document and save it as an image.
Pro: You have a picture of the document in your computer
Con: It looks like the crappy old document and is a large file
(kilobytes-wise) because it's an image, not a text document.

2. Retype the document.
Pro: You have the document stored in your computer.
Con: Took time to type it.

3. Scan the document into any scanner using OCR software (such as what is found here: a link=http://www.business.com/search/rslt_default.asp?r4=t&query=optical+character+recognition+ocr).
Pro: You have a neatly-formatted text document stored in your computer which should have all the original information reading accurately and professionally.
Con: After spending a few minutes cleaning up any extraneous characters that the software may have inaccurately translated, you're done, and you didn't have to type it all out yourself.

This kind of thing is done all the time in print houses that are provided with docuements that might be ratty from age, or copies that are hard to read from photocopying.

Instead of typing all the info out yourself, you can scan the document into any computer, and an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition) would "read" the image and translate the letterforms into text characters, generating a text document.

The next step is to then see what the software produced, which often includes some characters it might not have read correctly. You have to go in and "clean up" the additional garbled characters by deleting them, leaving behind the accurate information originally contained in the scanned document.

Now, of course, this is now going to be a computer-generated document, which you would want to format to look nice and professional. You know, like an MS Word document, and it would actually BE an MS Word document if that's your word processor of choice. When you print the document out, or even send it via computer as, maybe, a fax sent from a Kinko's in Texas, it would be all of the original information, but nice and neat, like an MS Word document.

You would even scan in the original signature and place that in the document also.

None of this is done for reasons of deceit. It's for storing documents. It's for record-keeping.

I don't know if these documents are real or not, but this would be a very plausible explanation for the existence of documents containing old information in a modern-looking text document complete with an accurate signature.

I used this software myself for two years, but it was about 7 years ago so I don't know what changes may have been made to the above process but I can't imagine it changing all that much.

If anyone is so inspired, Download.com has some versions of OCR software that one could download for free and try out, to get a better handle on it:

http://www.download.com/3120-20-0.html?qt=OCR&tg=dl-2001&search.x=5&search.y=8

I already had a freeper tell me that even if this was the case, the only reason you would scan a document into and "OCR Scanner" (which is inaccurate, there is no such thing, it's just software) is to alter it- which is bullshit, as I explained above, it's used for fast data entry.

[skooooo]

1. Small correction...

OCR documents ARE text documents. If you just want an image of a document, you don't need OCR software.

[complain jane]

2. Isn't that what I said?

Thank you for clarifying, but that really was what I meant to say from the outset....

That's why I wrote #1

OCR makes it a text doc instead

[skooooo]

3. my bad...too early in the morning i guess..lol

[complain jane]

4. No, no problem...

thanks for helping get the info right