[blindlaw] experience scanning legal materials

[Russell J. Thomas, Jr]

There are at least two reasons for this problem. First, you may be working
from a poor copy.  If the print is faint, the quality of the scan will be
poor, no matter which scanning software you use.  If possible, you should
have the transcript recopied in the hope that there will be a better
contrast between the printed material and the paper that the printed
material appears on.  The better the contrast the more readable the scan
will be.   

The second issue may be the quality of the scanning software.  I find that
Omnipage Version 16, (the most recent version) gives the best scanning
results, although others may have alternative suggestions.

Unfortunately, this is a problem we all face from time to time.  It happens
less often than it used to, but it still happens.  Hang in there!





Respectfully,

 

Russell J. Thomas, Jr.

THOMAS & ASSOCIATES

Orange County Office                      

2172 Dupont Drive, Suite 203                

Irvine, California 92612                             

T: (949) 752-0101                             

F: (949) 257-4756

M: (949) 466-7238

Beverly Hills Office

9107 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 450

Beverly Hills, California 90210 

T: (310) 461-3561

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of denise avant
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 1:18 PM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Subject: [blindlaw] experience scanning legal materials

hello all,
  In my job, i have to read a lot of transcripts from the federal and State
courts. in some new cases, i can get the court reporter to send me a copy of
the transcript on disk. however, if the case is old, and the transcripts
have already been generated, it is impossible to have this done. thus,
myself or my reader will scan the transcript with openbook, kurzweil or hp
scan. when my reader does it she saves the file as a rtf file or a word
file. when i pull it into word or braille it out, the file is virtually
unintelligible. however, she is able to visually read it on the screen. She
uses the hp scan program because she says the openbook or kurzweil program
does not handle the material well at all. i know there will be some scanning
errors. but she recently scanned two volumes of a documetn, and while she
can read it i cannot. can anyone share their scanning experiencces with
legal transcripts if any? thanks.