If you have OCR in the loop anyway, you could have just taken a picture of the file as displayed on the original laptop, no need to do the fax transfer.
Right. Fax is a terrible, crappy protocol that generates pretty bad images on the receiving side, even when you have clean phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern camera-phone photo of the screen displaying the text would yield a better image.
Also, replace the ambiguous characters like D/0 or 3/8 to something a bit more recognizable like D becomes d and 8 becomes X and then do a find-replace after the OCR process. Was there really a need to write the OCR software from scratch?
