Checkered Hags — Typophile archive

Gary Long30 October 2009 · 17:42

I occasionally have to convert the text of an out-of-print book into an editable digital file for a new edition, when the publisher no longer has (or never had) a computer file of it. OCR errors are inevitable, some of them quite hilarious.

Is there a name for OCR errors, especially the unintentionally humorous ones? I submit that they be called Checkered Hags. Here's the story: In a book about Indy car racing that I was OCRing, my OCR program had trouble with the f-l ligature. Instead of f-l, it responded with uppercase H. And of course the numerous checkered flags encountered in a book about auto racing became checkered Hags. (I had to check all H's in the OCRed text when I noticed this.)

Gary

Theunis de Jong30 October 2009 · 17:48

Wouldn't your spell checker Hag this as errors?

When floppy disks were still really floppy (and could be stapled to a printout), they were prone to having bad sectors. Rather than asking authors a new disk for a single bad sector, I usually just typed those missing 512 bytes from the manuscript. Then, being apprehensive at my typing skills, I would spell-check it. And sure enough, then a customer complained about his text describing lots of "pubic areas".