[blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review

Melissa Allman mrallman116 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 20 13:41:19 UTC 2016


Hi all. I also use Adobe Pro at work and  think it is more efficient and less clunky than OpenBook, but this is just my opinion. I will say though that using the OCR feature and converting documents into Word can work very well if the documents are clean, but many times I need the assistance of a human reader or someone to edit the documents for accuracy if the scan wasn't good and the OCR came out messy. I can't take the risk of compromising a client's interests because a document has issues. This definitely presents challenges at times. TI would be interested in knowing more about this Nuance program if it is more powerful though. This discussion is also letting me know that there are some possibly useful features in Adobe Pro that I am not using, so thanks. BTW I don't know about others but I really hate Word tables and find Excel ones much easier to use.

Congrats to all who made Law Review. I was on a journal when I was in law school (more than 10 years ago now so this makes me feel old) and it was a very stimulating experience.

Melissa Allman

Sent from my iPad

> On Aug 20, 2016, at 2:08 AM, Karla Gilbride via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> I can't speak about its value compared to Nuance, because I've never used
> Nuance, but Adobe Pro also converts pdf documents to Word and preserves much
> of the font and formatting information in the process, which I never found
> to be the case with OpenBook. It converts all but very long documents in a
> matter of a few seconds and also has a lot of functionality that I use at
> work, like combining multiple documents into a single pdf, deleting pages
> from pdfs, reducing the size of pdfs before sending them as e-mail
> attachments, etc. It's a pretty powerful program.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Deepa
> Goraya via BlindLaw
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 11:12 PM
> To: 'Blind Law Mailing List'
> Cc: Deepa Goraya
> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
> 
> Just curious, how is Adobe Pro? That converts PDFs to Word as well but don't
> know how good it is compared to Nuance.
> 
> Deepinder K. Goraya, ESQ.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of James
> Fetter via BlindLaw
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 3:25 PM
> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: James Fetter <jtfetter at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
> 
> Yes, and it does a very good job. It sometimes even manages to identify
> tables  and structure them as such in the Word doc, and it also does a fair
> job of picking up on fonts, including italics. It also is good for scanning,
> if you have to scan and send a properly formatted document, say, a signed
> contract, to a sighted person, and it allows for the conversion of
> pdf-to-word (including OCR) from file explorer (once installed, options
> appear under the applications menu to convert pdf as document to word, as
> spreadsheet to excel, etc). I think it's over $100, but I have found it
> useful for a variety of things. And, as for the pdf merging business, well,
> I hope that I can change that and a variety of other things next year. Out
> of curiosity, does your journal still have people physically mark up printed
> documents as part of the editing process? Mine does, and although I can
> obviously use the word version of the article instead, I have wondered how
> common that particular requirement is as well.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On 8/18/2016 3:14 PM, kelby carlson via BlindLaw wrote:
>> Interesting; that is not a requirement on my journal and it sounds 
>> very laborious. Does that software do OCR on PDFs as well?
>> 
>>> On 8/18/16, James Fetter via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>> For what it's worth, I always convert PDF's to Word first; it makes 
>>> navigation and copy/paste considerably easier. My law review requires 
>>> merging the pdf of the article or other source with the table of 
>>> contents for the volume/issue of the journal in which I found it, and 
>>> I would highly recommend a product (not cheap but very good) called 
>>> Nuance Power PDF Advanced. It works very well as a pdf-to-word 
>>> converter as well, sometimes better than Kurzweil 1000. I have found 
>>> that even some text PDF's do not interact very well with Jaws, hence 
>>> the strategy of preemptive conversion. Congratulations on being on 
>>> journal, and please feel free to reach out with any questions.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 8/18/2016 12:50 PM, kelby carlson via BlindLaw wrote:
>>>> My team has already said they will just avoid giving me print 
>>>> sources that haven't already been scanned. I've told them it would 
>>>> probably be easiest for me to convert problematic PDFs into Word 
>>>> with
> Kurzweil.
>>>> 
>>>> If anyone has suggestions about using the find feature in Adobe that 
>>>> would be nice.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On 8/18/16, Laura Wolk via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>> I second everything Tai said. Except for the caveat that if certain 
>>>>> articles were very print source heavy, I simply just switched off 
>>>>> of them onto other articles. My law review team was very willing to 
>>>>> be flexible with me in that way, as they would with, for instance, 
>>>>> students who were studying abroad and so did not have access to ILL 
>>>>> or to our print library. Alternatively, sometimes I would offer to 
>>>>> check longer ranges of footnotes on articles in exchange for 
>>>>> someone else taking on my print sources. Again, this was also a 
>>>>> practice implemented for students studying abroad. I think the goal 
>>>>> is to come up with equitable yet flexible solutions.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Laura
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 8/18/16, Tai Tomasi via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>>> I ran inaccessible PDFs through ABYY FineReader or similar OCR 
>>>>>> software when possible. If that did not render the document 
>>>>>> accessible, I worked with a human reader to access them.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Tai Tomasi, J.D.
>>>>>> Staff Attorney
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 400 East Court Ave., Ste. 300
>>>>>> Des Moines, Iowa 50309
>>>>>> Tel: 515-278-2502; Toll Free: 1-800-779-2502
>>>>>> FAX: 515-278-0539; Relay 711
>>>>>> E-mail: ttomasi at driowa.org
>>>>>> www.driowa.org
>>>>>> 
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>>>>>> 
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of 
>>>>>> kelby carlson via BlindLaw
>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 11:13 AM
>>>>>> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Cc: kelby carlson <kelbycarlson at gmail.com>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I am not always the one pulling sources directly, and i'm having a 
>>>>>> lot of trouble with certain PDFs. The regular ctrl-F command 
>>>>>> doesn't seem to work right, and the JAWS find command can only 
>>>>>> search the page that is on the screen.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Also, how exactly did you deal with print sources?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On 8/18/16, jim--- via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> I made journal this year myself, and would appreciate any infor 
>>>>>>> you get 'r'
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of 
>>>>>>> kelby carlson via BlindLaw
>>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 12:03 PM
>>>>>>> To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> Cc: kelby carlson <kelbycarlson at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> Subject: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> All,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I am wondering if anyone on here has been on law review in the 
>>>>>>> past and has pulled sources. The production team and I are 
>>>>>>> struggling to figure out an efficient process to do this with a 
>>>>>>> screen reader. Any help is greatly appreciated. I'd like to do as 
>>>>>>> much of it independently as possible.
>>>>>>> 
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