I am a retired Programmer that primarily codes for RM/Cobol. I have recently been contacted by one of the companies I worked for before I retired. They use programs written in RM/Cobol (6.09.04) on an SCO UNIX System (3.2v5.0.7). They wish to scan invoices into the system using a multipage scanner for future display and/or printing. What I envisioned was to have a COBOL program scan one page from the multipage bin and save it to a name generated by the program. The scanned image would then use OCR to convert the image into a TEXT file. The program could then scan the TEXT file and save pertinent information (such as invoice no., customer no.). My question is, are there programs available that can either interface with RM/Cobol or can be controlled from a call to "SYSTEM" for scanning and converting. I would also need a program that would be able to display the image and/or print the image from a call to "SYSTEM".
Thank you in advance.
Hi Jerry,
There are several Open Source programs that you can use from CALL "SYSTEM". Your main problem is going to be that current open source software will probably not be very useful on a platform that is so old. Perhaps their need for this capability will lead them to move to Linux and a far newer version of RM/COBOL!
Probably the best open source OCR is tesseract: code.google.com/.../tesseract-ocr
Scanner drivers are fairly specific, but you can usually invoke them from the command line which means that CALL "SYSTEM" will probably work as well.
Our application does all this, albeit on a Windows server platform: scan, photo, document processing, retrieving text from DOCX etc. So, I know it can be done.
I would strongly urge your client to first get to a modern platform that is supported, both hardware and software. In fact, I would not take the business if they refuse to move. SCO is out of business. Probably the best upgrade path would be to a Linux operating system (rather than Windows) so that the shell scripts will be a bit closer to what is needed.
Good luck!
Tom Morrison
Hill Country Software
I am a retired Programmer that primarily codes for RM/Cobol. I have recently been contacted by one of the companies I worked for before I retired. They use programs written in RM/Cobol (6.09.04) on an SCO UNIX System (3.2v5.0.7). They wish to scan invoices into the system using a multipage scanner for future display and/or printing. What I envisioned was to have a COBOL program scan one page from the multipage bin and save it to a name generated by the program. The scanned image would then use OCR to convert the image into a TEXT file. The program could then scan the TEXT file and save pertinent information (such as invoice no., customer no.). My question is, are there programs available that can either interface with RM/Cobol or can be controlled from a call to "SYSTEM" for scanning and converting. I would also need a program that would be able to display the image and/or print the image from a call to "SYSTEM".
Thank you in advance.
At our company, we use a third party software called "Affininty" which allows scanned documents to be attached to invoices, customers, etc. That might be something the company might look into. (I don't know if it works for Unix. We run on a Windows Platform)
