Scanning green bar documents

[dittman]

Does anyone have any experience with scanning green bar documents?

I have a large banker's box full of program listings that I'd like to scan and OCR.

 

[smplfyi]

Okay then, let me be the first to ask. What is a green bar document?

 

[krebizfan]

Green bar paper is just what the name describes, paper that alternates between green and white giving a striped appearance. Something like https://www.labeloutfitters.com/350...orations-continuous-stock-computer-paper.html

Seems like a bit of a challenge since my scanning of those sometimes resulted in the green bar obscuring the text written on it especially with old faded dot matrix printouts. There may be ways with newer color scanners to keep the green bar differentiated from the text.

 

[Al Kossow]

Does anyone have any experience with scanning green bar documents?

I have a fair bit of experience. Find a scanner or an application that can do color dropouts.

 

[commodorejohn]

In a pinch, you can use an image editor like Photoshop or GIMP; copy the green channel (which should show close to 100% intensity for everything except the printed text) over to the other two channels, and you have a monochrome image with black-ish text on a white-ish background (although I expect OCR will require a bit more contrast-adjustment and cleanup.) Heck, ImageMagick probably has a way to do this in batch processing from the command line.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Most of my greenbar stock has blue bars.

 

[Trixter]

If scanning greenbar for OCR'ing the text, scan them as B&W (not grayscale, not color). The greenbar should snap to white upon scanning. If that doesn't work, then scan it as grayscale and you'll have to post-process the scans into B&W where you can pick the threshold level.