On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 01:36:48PM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote:
> On Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 00:16:23 PST Polytropon wrote:
> >On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:06:18 -0800, Gary Kline <kl...@thought.org> wrote:
> >> Thanks, Gents,
> >>
> >> But according to one smallish pdf file that I send to a web based
> >> tool, it was not a real pdf. Or, more accurately, it (the pdf to
> >> speech program) couldn't decode it.
> >
> >This is a typical problem with "poorly engineered" PDFs where the
> >author puts in the text as images (you'll see this stupidity across
> >the Web, too).
>
> In most cases where I've seen this, it's because they had scanned an
> actual printed document. Many old, out-of-print books are being made
> newly available this way, so I'm not inclined to complain.
>
> Unfortunately, OCR software still isn't reliable enough (or, if
> reliable, cheap enough) to convert these scanned images to actual text.
You're probably right about the cost/performance idea. Still,
before I get back to the Last few pages of my thesis, maybe I'll
try feeding parts of my most vanilla image-PDF file to an
opensource OCR program. I'm pretty sure there are a couple in
ports. IIRC, though, the images have to be jpegs of tiffs or the
like. If anybody knows, please give me a shout out!
gary
--
Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
The 2.23a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php
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