[tfvlrue]

Author here. I was also surprised by this.

I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screenshots from the blog post were after the point I decided OCR wasn't working, so I was using a heavily reduced font size to optimize the transfer time. Hence the characters looked like barely-legible blobs.

The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile.

Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)

[steve1977]

Just out of curiosity, would that old Mac OS have had OCR A or OCR B fonts available? (pretty sure Windows would have). These were essentially designed for OCR (duh...)

[tfvlrue]

Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.

[PhasmaFelis]

> I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line).

Wow. That is very surprising. I'm baffled.