Great new find to aid IJN, IJA aircraft production
My principle source for 3-view drawings, specs and especially crew space drawings and photography, has always been Maru Mechanic and Famous Aircraft of the World (FAOW). And although they’re almost universally top notch, the big minus has always been…. dammit, it’s in Kanji. I don’t speak or read Japanese. Over the years I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a page of a Maru or FAOW book that I know details and explains a system or a specific knob or lever… but I can’t read it.
I recently found a freeware OCR (optical character recognition) software that supported asian character sets, but…. arrrrrgh! It’s INTERFACE was in Kanji, so I couldn’t figure out how to use it. OCR has always been a bit of a hit or miss proposition, so I was loathe to spend any $$$ on a crapshoot that I could get translations of scans.
Just yesterday, that all changed. I saw in a web review that OmniPage 17, one of the oldest OCR packages dating back to 1995 or earlier, had just added asian character support. I found one on ebay for $80. I hemmed, I hawed… I bid. I took the risk.
Well, the software arrived quickly from Brooklyn, NY and I loaded it this T-giving weekend. I scanned in a cockpit legend… got the results in a Kanji font, exported them to MSWord, and then cut and pasted a few test items into GoogleTranslate to check, and…. success!!!! A few items need to be trained, and some items got mixed up because I OCR’d it in columns rather than one lump of text. But I sure can’t complain.
This is going to be great, I think. Not just in getting those tantalizing system descriptions, but also some of the narrative articles that fill out each Maru and FAOW!
Consider this a review and a rave one at that, for Nuance’s Omnipage 17.
