[Blindmath] InftyReader problem: output contains image tags/commands rather than text

[Maria Kristic]

Hi John,

Thanks so much! This was really helpful! As I hope was fairly obvious from
my message, I'm a total and thus could not see the image myself, and I don't
have any type of setup like a ViewPlus embosser to be able to produce a
tactile copy of the image which I could independently look at, so I only had
the info which the other person told me to report--the person, I'm sure,
just didn't think that the border was an important enough fact to let me
know about (they don't have much experience with OCR settings), so I really
appreciate your looking in to this to enlighten me. I'm a Computer Science
major, so I definitely know what you mean about things which seem so trivial
not actually turning out that way to implement. I Googled to see if I could
find out what would have caused those borders to appear, and all results I
got basically kept stating that if the scan cut off part of the document or
contained too much of the glass area (in the form of white space, I assume,
and this might also produce a scan-introduced border?), that the person
should resize the page margins for the paper size they were scanning--I'd
think that's common sense, but I'll follow up on that and check out whether
the person set them properly (like I said, since they don't have much
experience with OCR settings, perhaps they didn't because they didn't know
they could/had to). In the meantime, I'll nicely ask someone sighted I know
who is technically inclined and has edited graphics for me before when I've
wanted to send only parts of images to people and such to edit the PDF's for
me, and I'm sure they'll be willing, so I'll be able to finally get
something useful out of these PDF's hopefully soon!

Thanks again! Thanks also to Alastair, who replied to tell me that I wasn't
alone in having issues with images--that was comforting to know I wasn't
doing anything wrong :) .

Best,
Maria

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of John Gardner
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 2:52 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] InftyReader problem: output contains image
tags/commands rather than text

Hello Maria.  It has taken a while to get the right people to look at 
your PDF files, but the reason for their non-conversion is now clear. 
These scans all have a dark border around the page.  Infty Reader 
considers that to indicate a graphic.  We have seen this problem before, 
and the Infty group is working on a solution in a future release.  It is 
not as easy as it might seem to distinguish graphics from text!  In the 
meantime the solution is to remove those dark bands (which probably were 
introduced when the paper was scanned.  I am sure that a person 
knowledgeable in computer graphics file editing can find a way to edit 
out those black bands, but one needs to be careful not to reduce the 
resolution.  Infty Reader works great at 600 dpi but less well at 400 dpi.

My advice to Infty Reader usersis to avoid noise around the page when 
scanning.  If it can't be avoided in anyother way, use a large piece of 
white paper behind the page being scanned.

hope this is helpful!

John Gardner