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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Actually, I blame Microsoft and Adobe for this. Most often than not ancient forms that are paper only are the result of the original being lost and like an old story they are now distributed via copies of copies. BTW, Adobe Acrobat Pro lets you add forms on top of documents. If your scanner scans to PDF you should be able to open with Acrobat and just drop some fields on it.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new
I don't know. With an unlimited budget, the military seem to have a lot of cool "toys."
Roger Wright wrote:
Any candidates out there? :-D
I've seen several paper-to-electronic software packages out there that claim to do this. Unfortunately, I've not seen the product of their work.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Some people are making such thorough preparation for rainy days that they aren't enjoying today's sunshine." - William Feather
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote:
The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new
I don't know. With an unlimited budget, the military seem to have a lot of cool "toys."
Roger Wright wrote:
Any candidates out there? :-D
I've seen several paper-to-electronic software packages out there that claim to do this. Unfortunately, I've not seen the product of their work.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Some people are making such thorough preparation for rainy days that they aren't enjoying today's sunshine." - William Feather
DavidCrow wrote:
the military seem to have a lot of cool "toys."
When I did a lot of work for the military, the toys were certainly neat, but when you looked under the hood the parts they were built with were mostly obsolete, like NMOS circuits when industry had already adopted CMOS as standard; that was about a twenty year gap.
Will Rogers never met me.
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DavidCrow wrote:
the military seem to have a lot of cool "toys."
When I did a lot of work for the military, the toys were certainly neat, but when you looked under the hood the parts they were built with were mostly obsolete, like NMOS circuits when industry had already adopted CMOS as standard; that was about a twenty year gap.
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
When I did a lot of work for the military, the toys were certainly neat
You can say that again, I watched the documentary, "The Men In Black" where Will Smith stars as himself. And wow, they definitely have some toys. I do, however prefer the historically accurate "Wild Wild West."
Craigslist Troll: litaly@comcast.net "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. " — Hunter S. Thompson
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Hi! I think Nuance PaperPort can do this.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
There used to be gazillions of these out there, not so long ago. Unfortunately time has removed my ability to remember the names of a single one of them. A quick Bingle for 'paper form builder', however, revealed some likely candidates.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
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DavidCrow wrote:
the military seem to have a lot of cool "toys."
When I did a lot of work for the military, the toys were certainly neat, but when you looked under the hood the parts they were built with were mostly obsolete, like NMOS circuits when industry had already adopted CMOS as standard; that was about a twenty year gap.
Will Rogers never met me.
Yep. And it was often very poorly designed at that. But at least the (always unshielded) wiring looms were very neatly labelled.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Yep. And it was often very poorly designed at that. But at least the (always unshielded) wiring looms were very neatly labelled.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
How well I remember capturing streams of 50 nS pulse data from missile navigation downlinks using wire-wrapped cards, plugged into wire-wrapped backplanes, all constructed without shielding and all the wires the same color. Thousands of them. X| I snuck in on a weekend, ripped out what my tech wired, rebuilt the circuits using hand rolled twisted pairs of wire wrap, and got the jitter and crosstalk down to levels that couldn't (then) be measured. :-D If an inspector, or a union steward had caught me, my career would have ended a lot sooner. But so would that missile contract.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Hi! I think Nuance PaperPort can do this.
Regards, mav -- Black holes are the places where God divided by 0...
I'll look into it! Thanks! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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You can try ... Foxit. PDF Tools http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html[^]
Wow! That little set of tools is powerful magic. I'm bookmarking it for now, but overlaying a pdf with fillable text boxes isn't one of its tricks. The best solution is to either scan to pdf, buy Adobe Acrobat Pro, and hope it can work together with the scan, or buy a scanner that comes with a decent OCR package. The one we have is one of those huge Xerox machines that prints, copies, scans, faxes, and emails, but it doesn't do OCR.
Will Rogers never met me.
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There used to be gazillions of these out there, not so long ago. Unfortunately time has removed my ability to remember the names of a single one of them. A quick Bingle for 'paper form builder', however, revealed some likely candidates.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
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Actually, I blame Microsoft and Adobe for this. Most often than not ancient forms that are paper only are the result of the original being lost and like an old story they are now distributed via copies of copies. BTW, Adobe Acrobat Pro lets you add forms on top of documents. If your scanner scans to PDF you should be able to open with Acrobat and just drop some fields on it.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
That's probably the best solution, but it's hard to get the boss to pay that much for software. He's odd that way. When I needed AutoCAD to develop drawings to fabricate the steel for a substation I designed, he insisted on buying two copies, one for me and one for him. As far as I know, he's never opened his copy, though it's been installed for 5 years. When he wanted me to map our system, I acquired ESRI ArcInfo, but had to get a copy for his machine, too. He's never opened that, either. But when I ask for SAG10, an industry standard program for calculating cable tensions for transmission lines to make sure they don't come too close to the ground, he says we can't afford it, even though it costs about the same as AutoCAD. Instead, every time I design a new line, we have to pay an outside engineering consultant $30,000 to calculate the sag tension. It makes sense to him, but it's got me baffled...:confused: One thing I'm looking forward to, if I can find a way to swing it financially, is this Masters program I'm looking at. One of the required classes is finite element analysis, and given a good introduction to that, especially if it includes numerical methods, I'd have the tools to write my own equivalent to SAG10. :)
Will Rogers never met me.
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You can add text in any decent image editor, even half baked ones like paint let you do that. :laugh:
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
Obviously, but typing it is faster, and I don't want to be the only one in the office capable of filling out scanned forms. Believe me, I've had to teach these people how to capture a non-printable screen with Ctrl-PrtScrn, paste into Paint, and print, and they can't remember the steps for two weeks. Inserting text into a scanned image is way beyond their skill levels.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Scan the document, put the image in a Word document, overlay text, delete image, print using original document loaded into paper tray.
That's a possibility, but getting Word to format a paragraph reliably is quite a challenge; I'm not sure we have enough available time to tweak it into such a task. I'm certain it would never come out twice the same, even if we made it a template.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Dealing with the federal government, as we do regularly, we are often required to fill in forms using a typewriter. The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision. As I watched our accountant struggle to remember how to use a typewriter this morning to fill in a few blanks on yet another timewasting redundant form, it occured to me that surely someone has come up with a tool that would allow us to scan useless documents, automatically locate blanks in need of filling, and allow us to type in responses in the blanks using an actual computer. It might even be that one of our members (or more likely 400+ of them) has written such a tool, but I haven't seen it. Any candidates out there? :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
The US Government is probably the single greatest obstacle to technical advances in the world, as the entire lot are always the last in the Universe to adopt anything new, and the rest of us are constrained by their lack of vision.
The Metric system, for instance.
Cheers, विक्रम (CCC count - 6.) "We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread :doh:
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Thanks for the suggestion Roger. I have already tried #3 from your list. Unfortunately by the time they had grown to an edible size[^] I had forgotten why I had planted them.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
