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syncboy t1_j8t4xto wrote

OCR technology wasn’t very good until very recently. It also used to change text, letters, capitalization, etc.

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bothunter t1_j8t952g wrote

This had nothing to do with OCR -- it was due to compression artifacts. Specifically it looked for common patterns and created a lookup table to save space. It's just that some numbers and letters look similar enough to that algorithm that it didn't notice that a 6 and 8 were different "patterns"

And that was the issue -- nobody was using the Xerox to scan the text -- they just wanted it to make identical copies like all other Xerox machines did in the past.

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