Omni-Reader

Sinclair User

READING BETWEEN THE LINES The Omni-Reader from Oberon international is the first OCR - Optical Character Reader - for less than £1,000. Not only does it fit on a desk top but it will work with both the Spectrum - with Interface One - and the QL. For the price you cannot expect it to be all singing and dancing, but, within its design limitations, it is a remarkable piece of hardware. It even won a Sunday Times award for the best innovation of the year. It consists of a plastic tablet, a little wider and a little taller than a sheet of A4 paper. On one side is a slide which holds a ruler at right angles across the tablet. On the ruler is the read head. The ruler is lined up with a piece of text and the head moved by hand from side to side to read into the computer. A series of LEDs along the top of the tablet are used to show its status. The Omni-Reader connects to the computer via an RS232 port. On the QL you can use a standard Sinclair lead - supplied by CLPS it is cheaper - plugged into SER2. On the Spectrum some of the wires have to be swopped. It can be set to send information at a number of different baud rates from 300 to 9600. In order to keep the price at a realistic level a number of limitations have been put on the Omni-Reader. The main one is that in its standard form it can only recognise four different type styles. Courier 10, Courier 12, Letter Gothic 12 and Prestige Elite 12. Those represent 80 percent of the most commonly used type faces in business. It does, however, mean that for the home user you can not use it to enter listings from magazines - which tend to be the wrong size and style - or dot matrix printouts. To get around that limitation it is possible to download different styles but at the moment, and for the forseeable future, it is unlikely that the facility will be available to Sinclair users'. That is because the Omni-Reader is aimed at the business user and is supplied with software for those machines. As a humble home computer user you have to write your own input routines and, as a matter of policy, Oberon will not tell you how to program your own styles. Using one of the four type styles you can, with practice, get better than 95 percent accurate input. Using some sample text supplied with the Omni-Reader I managed to get 100 per cent but that was by being excessively careful - and slow. Speed is another important consideration. It takes roughly two to three minutes to input a page of A4 text, longer if you have to re-read lines due to errors. That is approximately the same speed as a good copy typist, who would be possibly less prone to errors. So that, in theory, you do not have to use the keyboard to change type styles or send control codes there are some options printed on the top of the tablet, with more in the manual. If, for example, the text you want to input is only made up of numbers and pound signs you just run the read head over the word Numeric, which is preceded by two special black blobs, on the top of the tablet. That works quite well although reading from the manual requires you to hold both the manual and ruler while moving the read head, all at the same time. Overall the Omni-Reader is the sort of peripheral which you cannot do without or is completely superfluous. It works well, but you might find it frustrating as you cannot use it on everything. It even has problems reading the QL manual which, although clearly written, uses the wrong type-style. It shows what can be done at a realistic price, but soon makes you want more features. The basic Omni-Reader is priced at £399.00 plus VAT (£458.85). Oberon International, [redacted].

Personal Computer News

Geof Wheelwight

READING BETWEEN THE LINES All kinds of text are transferred directly into your micro with the Omni-Reader. Character reference by Geof Wheelwright. PRODUCT: Omni Reader APPLICATION: Optical character reader PRICE: £458.85 AVAILABLE: Oberon International [redacted] A tough assignment. I collected a A large cardboard box holding a device which would eliminate the paperclip office by 'reading' paper documents into text files on a micro. I was excited by the prospect of being able to have all my favourite reviews, articles and program listings transferred into my micro without the tedious typing bit. I even had visions of selling the filing cabinet. Oberon International's Omni-Reader is an under £500 optical character reader (OCR) which runs on any micro fitted with an RS232 serial communications interface and a terminal communications program. I tried it with several micros: a Compaq portable IBM compatible, the Tandy Model 100 portable and the NEC PC-8201A portable. FEATURES Expecting something sturdy and precise, I opened the box to find a plastic tablet, supporting a plastic hinged ruler with a plastic read head and a series of somewhat confusing LED lights running along the top of the device. There was a whiff of Heath Robinson about the thing. Moving to the back, I noted the 'interfaces' and function switches. The device has a socket at the far right for the mains (an external power supply generates the necessary voltage), a socket for the read head lead and a full-spec 25-line RS232 D-plug socket. There are also two sets of DIP switches; the first sets baud rate, the second sets communications functions (pitch of type, handshaking, beep on/off, international character set selection). IN USE After fruitless hours trying to use the Omni-Reader I sent out for another - the original review machine's read head was defective. With the new machine, my original frustration soon turned to fascination. The reader was still hard to use, and I had to move the head across the text at exactly the right spot and at the right speed, but I did get it working, and for a machine costing under £500, I consider that a major achievement. Using the Omni-Reader is initially like driving someone else's car; you know what you're supposed to do, and what the car should do, but you don't know you must stick your finger in the dashboard and wiggle it to get the turn signal working. It's a matter of getting the knack before you can use the device properly. The Omni-Reader works off a standard RS232 serial interface and should operate with any machine with a full-specification RS232 or RS423 (the Beeb's serial interface). The manufacturers, Oberon, kept the system 'open' by not supplying any cable as standard equipment. But this leaves it up to you to make up your own cable, with either a standard D-plug or a BBC-style DIN plug on the other end. The communications protocols are a little unusual, but they seem to work; No Parity, one start bit, eight data bits and two stop bits. Most communications or 'terminal' programs let you set these, but make sure yours does before you invest in the Oberon system. The difficulty of interpreting the meaning of the LED indicators at the top of the machine could possibly be simplified with a little embedded LCD display, to give an English language reading telling you what's going on at any given moment. And guide rails on both sides of the Omni-Reader, along with a more sturdy ruler, would make the system much less something you have to get the hang of. I'm sure that having developed this technology for the current machine, we can look forward to an enhanced or more upmarket OCR soon. The basic components are there. VERDICT The Omni-Reader is a good idea in need of a few refinements. Because the price is comparatively low, it's hard to complain, but I wouldn't mind paying up to £100 more to make it a little more sturdy and a bit easier to use. I see the Omni-Reader as the ZX81 of the optical character reader world - it's cheap, it works, but it's difficult to use and limited in its power. I can hardly wait for the 'Spectrum'.

Omni-Reader: revolutionary device with 'a whiff of Heath Robinson'.