[BlindMath] How good is Adobe Acrobat's conversion of PDF to HTML?

Wed Mar 3 20:47:59 UTC 2021

Hello Susan/Jonathan et al.,

In a production sense, Susan's advice is sound. The imperfections with the conversion and error checking make it quite inefficient, but...  

I use this technique often. I'd rather have 95% accuracy today without equations than wait days for a human to read it to me or weeks for a production-house solution. If I can't tell that the material around the equations is good enough to bother getting the equations translated, then the resource isn't good enough for my students either.

N.B. I have the luxury of choosing which books I use. A production house like Susan's must work on the material chosen by course staff.

I must also observe that  the process is extremely hit and miss. Some books come out well enough while others are worse than reading the raw pdf. Mathematical content is often butchered beyond recognition, but sometimes that isn't the worst problem because it gets totally blotted out. Proper semantic structure is not always retained and the failure to capture such elements is table structure affect the ultimate value I put on the outcome.

Greater success seems to come with date of publication. More recent works do come out better. I had such a good run at one stage that I grabbed other books in the same series only to find that the publisher had obviously changed something at their end along the way.

The practice and teaching of statistics is undergoing quite a lot of change though so I'm now only really after books published in the last five years. Even then, I'm hugely focused on books that offer an online version, often via GitHub. My colleagues in Mathematics and Computer Science aren't quite as worried. Their choices around textbooks aren't always about the content (calculus is calculus) but what additional tools the staff or students get from selecting that particular text.

We might also want to remember that the most common point of educating people is so that they can find employment. Access to educational resources is hugely important, but for anyone who has moved on from their education , ongoing access to quality (up to date) resources could make the difference in how well they advance their career.

Jonathan G

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Susan Kelmer via BlindMath
Sent: Thursday, 4 March 2021 6:43 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Susan Kelmer <Susan.Kelmer at colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] How good is Adobe Acrobat's conversion of PDF to HTML?

Oh no.  No.  Don't do this. Adobe Acrobat's ability to OCR is quite limited, and it does not do a good job at it, no matter what the output is.

Susan Kelmer
Alternate Format Production Program Manager Disability Services Division of Student Affairs www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices 

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-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jonathan Fine via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, March 3, 2021 10:37 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com>; Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at hellenic-institute.uk>
Subject: [BlindMath] How good is Adobe Acrobat's conversion of PDF to HTML?

Hi

In response to a message to texhax, Philip Taylor wrote:

> Kellee asked particularly about *Fundamentals of Aerodynamics, Sixth
Edition,* by John D. Anderson, Jr.  The PDF of this book is available on the web, and Adobe Acrobat appears able to convert it into HTML (the resulting file is 9MB in size, with 3621 support files totalling 25,8MB).
I have no way of knowing whether the HTML would be accessible to Kellee's student, but I would be more than happy to make the HTML available to her if she were interested.

I'm grateful to Phil for making this effort. Is there anyone on this list willing to look at this HTML and to express an opinion? I'll then forward the response to TeX developers.

If the HTML is good, we have a result. If the HTML is bad then we have test data for an accessibility checker.

best wishes

Jonathan
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