New and in need of help. (fwd)

[Geoff Shang]

Hi anna:

I'll try to answer some of your questions.

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Anna Schneider wrote:

> About joining the reflector, I don't think I can.  I have a very old DOS
> system, which may pose other problems actually.  i'm buying a new computer
> for Linux so that isn't the issue, but etting the installation information
> may be.  That will be in my other questions though.

If you only have DOS, then sadly speak freely will be out of reach.
However, even if you have windows 3.1, I believe there is a speak freely
client which should let you talk to us.

> > I have a Decktalk Express. I've been told that will work with Speakup.

It will.

> > I've also heard that Emacspeak is useful kind of in addition.  I don't
> > know what synthesizers it works with though.

It definitely works with dectalk express.

> > I do need to get a scanner.  How does scanning text currently work in
> > Linux?  Is it doable?

It is doable, but yields varying results depending on how much you want to
invest.  currently there is a commercial package called ocrshop from
vividata which apparently has the onmipage OCR engine in it.  It seems to
work well from all accounts.  I've not used it, not being in a position to
invest in software (among other things), so I can't advise on its
effectiveness or usability.  But I believe several other users on here use
it.  A poster here the other day said that it only supports SCSI scanners
though.  Not sure how much it costs either, but I think it's pretty good
compared to some windows ones.

There is also an opensource OCR solution which uses the GOCR/JOCR (not sure
which they call it these days) libraries.  Kirk has begun writing a
front-end to these libs called socrates, but it is very much in its infancy
and is only available from the speakup CVS repository.  It does however use
the SANE (scanner access now easy) interface to scanners which supports a
wider array of scanner types, including USB scanners and some parallel port
devices.

Overall, getting scanners to work is not a particularly easy task as far as
tasks go under linux, so feel free to ask for help.  I've yet to tackle
this one myself, though now that I have a USB port and Linux on the same
box, I may well give it a shot soon.

I hope someone can give you recommendations on word processing and book
keeping.  I think there are some text-based business finance packages
around, but haven't realy checked any out.

Geoff.