Subject: Japanese OCR

From: [email-masked] (Mike Collinson)
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 1994 10:29:20 +0900 (JST)

Steven,
 
	Sorry to here of your data loss, I know the feeling.  If I
made a copy of reply and can find it I will send it on. If I recall the
gist was that products which do Japanese OCR including Kanji only came
on the market in the last year here so they may be rare on the ground
in the US.  The only place I know that might help is Kinokoniya a big
Japanese bookstore chain with shop(s) in the US which do Japanese
related software.  Here in Japan I have brochures for a
hardware/software system put out by Oki (of fax machine etc fame) and
a software package by a small company called Birds.  The latter runs
on NEC PC9801 PCs only (non-IBM compatible) but I dimly recall them
saying they would bring a DOS/V version out for IBM compatibles.
Email me if you want contact tel/fax/address for either of these.
 
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Mike Collinson
Assistant Manager, Product Engineering Dept., UX Software Development Div.,
NEC Corporation, Daito Tamachi Building, 14-22 Shibaura 4-Chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108, JAPAN
Email: [email-masked]               Fax:+81-3-3456-6675
				               Tel:+81-3-3456-7451
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From: Patricia O'Neill-Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 1994 22:07:15 -0500 (EST)

I found a reference to an OCR program in Vol. IV Issue 1 of 
Multilingual Computing. Description follows:

SOCR Symbolic OCR
For Unix, Sun

Languages: Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian

SOCR is an omnifont optical character recognition program which 
converts page images of Japanese text (including kanji, kana and 
romaji) to machine readable Shift-JIS files. SOCR runs on Sun 
workstations; ports to other UNIX workstations are available upon 
request. A MS Windows version is under development.

UNIX versions of SOCR are based on X Window. PCs and Macs can share a 
UNIX based OCR engine across a network via X Windows. TIFF image files 
are supported for input. Output files are in shift-JIS. SOCR produces 
output files which are compatible with machine translation programs.

SOCR uses English language menus. The user does not need to know 
Japaense to process Japanese text pages. Other language character sets 
(e.g., Cyrillic, Chinese, Hebrew, etc.) are available upon request.

SOCR is available in a variety of formats, from software only through 
complete turn-key systems. A variety of options are available, 
including scanners, machine translation programs, word processors, and 
text search databases.

Disk formats: 3 1/2" diskette, Tape
Documentation: Printed, On-Line

MRJ Inc.
10455 White Granite Drive
Oakton, VA 22124
703-385-0700
703-385-4637 Fax
No internet address provided

Patricia O'Neill-Brown