[Blindmath] Question about converting Math Book Content

[Jose Tamayo]

Hi,

this is what the professor indicated:

I have run into a large brick wall on the MAD 1100 book for Jorge.  We
scanned and saved as PDF, which is an acceptable form of input to
InftyReader.  The PDF looks beautiful.  But InftyReader totally fails and I
get gibberish as a result.

I then took the PDF and tried to convert to Word, and got a Word doc with
image objects.  Apparently my scan software creates the PDF by inserting an
image of the scan, which is why InftyReader can't do anything with it, and
why I cannot select and copy the text from the PDF into a Word doc either.

I then did a capture of the PDF page contents with SnagIt and saved as a TIF
and as a PNG, both of which are supposed to be supported by InftyReader as
input formats. I got 2 lines of garbage back from InftyReader.  Text to
speech cannot read the PDF either, again probably because the text is stored
as an image within the PDF.

The only other option I can think of is to rescan everything, allowing my
scan software to do OCR and save to RTF, which gives me a 40-50% accurate
result.  This is really bad news, as it will slow us down tremendously by
having to rescan everything, do massive corrections of the text, plus
inserts of every last math expression.  I am unable to get anything usable
by having the OCR software try to convert the PDF that it created from our
first scanning.  It might be faster to actually transcribe the text by hand,
with a fast typist, as hand editing is quite slow. 


---- 
-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Alastair Irving
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 11:50 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Question about converting Math Book Content

Hi

as far as I'm aware there's no other software which can do OCR of 
mathematical content.  You could use any other OCR software to recognise 
the text content of the book, (and possibly even very basic mathematical 
expressions), but for all the non-standard symbols, fractions, etc, you 
need Infty.

What problem are you facing with Infty?

Alastair

On 24/01/2010 13:39, Jose Tamayo wrote:
> Hello Folks,
>
>
>
> I have run into a wall with Infty Reader and  performing an OCR on a math
> book for a friend of mine; I have sighted help for this.  The book is not
> available in electronic format as the Publisher has no such content
> available for the book.  I am attempting to figure out if there is another
> way to obtain the content from the book with a similar tool to Infty
Reader.
>
>
>
>
> Any suggestions from this group would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Jose Tamayo
>
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