Hi Tim,

Any 200 dpi B%W or greyscale resolution scanner is adequate for OCR scanning. That means just about every scanner on the market. All readers should cope with imperfectly angled scans and good OCR program will also cope with imperfectly flattened pages (e.g. thick book scanning), but if you are getting misreads from the well flattened areas, you have lousy software. There are some programs out there that use wild contextual word-guessing to compensate for poor actual character recognition. If you find your software guessing – for instance. turning 'bard' int 'bird' – dump it; a good reader will call for your intervention on ALL glyphs it has problems reading and not fake its claimed reading score with contextual guesswork. 
At the time I was involved in the OCR business, Omnipage was the clear leader. It probably still is, but the bells and whistles of its current iteration exceed most people's needs, and it charges for its quality. I have found the ABBYY FineReader software, provided FREE of charge with my Epson scanner, totally adequate for my current needs, with only badly inked characters being queried. I presume Canon reading software must be on a par with the Epson offering to stay competitive. Do you perhaps need to download an update to your scanner's drivers? I've not tried VelOCRaptor.

All the best,
Alan

On 6 May 2011, at 14:56, THDW wrote:

> Listers
> 
> I am in the process of scanning old books.
> 
> I am using a five year old Canon printer scanner and then once the MP Navigator has scanned, I use VelOCRaptor to do the ocr work.
> 
> I sometime find that entire pages need revision. I am therefore wondering whether there has been an improvement in scanners for OCR work over the last few years. Or is my problem quite simply I am not getting the text flat enough against the scanner window ?
> 
> Would be grateful for any ideas for making text less tedious.
> 
> 
> T
> 
> 
>