Form Filling All-In-One Printer/Scanner
Ten years ago, I had an inkjet printer (it was a Canon) with amazing mechanical registration: you could print a document, take out the paper, put it back in the tray, print the same document on top of it, and you couldn’t tell! Everything was perfectly aligned, to the sub-millimeter. This was a sub-$100 printer. So I know this technology exists in consumer-ready form.
The other piece of my idea is OCR software. Again, what I need from it is far less than what is available right now.
What do I want? I want an all-in-one scanner/printer doohickey. Take a form — any reasonable size — and feed it through the document feeder. The hardware would scan it, the software would identify the fields where one needs to enter text (they will usually be underlined or have boxes for each letter) and then allow you to type, like those fill-in PDF files. You would type the text you want on the form, feed it through the document feeder again, and, Bingo! It would print out your answers, perfectly legibly, onto the empty form. It would size its font and everything to be just right.
I thought of this in college, years ago. I’m tired of waiting for venture cap to make a fortune building this myself. I just want someone to build it now. Take the idea. Make your million bucks. Just charge less than $200, and I’ll buy at least one.
Please. Now. My handwriting’s getting worse as we speak. Build it now.
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February 6th, 2008 at 4:09 am
And write a driver for Linux, dammit!
February 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pm