[Blindmath] Question about converting Math Book Content

[Roopakshi Pathania]

Ah, reminds me of my own college days when I had to edit most of the Math by hand.

This might not be helpful, but can you get the instructor in question to split the PDF and then perform OCR using InftyReader?

I prefer to split the PDF into chunks of around 50 to 100 pages.
Perhaps InftyReader can now handle more than that, but this method is still useful because it allows one to narrow down the range that may contain problematic pages. Besides, you still get the rest of the book.

Adobe Pro can do this, and so can a number of freeware utilities.
The one that I use is PDF Helper.
http://www.rptea.com/freeware.aspx

Regards

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
~ John Kenneth Galbraith


--- On Tue, 1/26/10, Jose Tamayo <jtblas at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Jose Tamayo <jtblas at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Question about converting Math Book Content
> To: "'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'" <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 12:35 AM
> 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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> 
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