[Blindmath] Question about converting Math Book Content

[John Gardner]

Scanning to PDF should be fine, but only if you scan at 600 dpi.  400 
dpi gives reasonable results, but 600 is much better.  Black and white 
is recommended largely to save space, since only two bits are used per 
point.  Most scanners do not scan at such a high resolution by default, 
so if you did not set the resolution properly, you will get garbage from 
Infty Reader, although a standard OCR should do okay on the words.  Send 
the PDF to me please, and I'll tell you what's wrong.
John Gardner


On 1/25/2010 11:05 AM, Jose Tamayo wrote:
> 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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