2 ms·

Ask HN: Does software exist to digitize scanned books and articles?

4 points by chmaynard 10y ago

I've noticed that when I view a PDF of an old book or article, often I can't select and copy text. I assume this is because (1) text selection is disabled somehow, or (2) the document is essentially just a collection of images. Does software exist that can convert a printed page with a lot of math notation into a truly digital document? I'm looking for the same level of quality as TeX. Thanks!

espeed 10y ago
Yes, PDFMiner in Python https://github.com/euske/pdfminer https://github.com/euske/pdfminer Apache PDFBox in Java https://pdfbox.apache.org https://pdfbox.apache.org Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327493 For a list of others, see http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2016/04/19/pdf-tools-extract-text-and-data-from-pdfs.html http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2016/04/19/pdf-tools-extract-text-a...
- chmaynard 10y ago
  According to the PDFMiner site, pdf2txt.py cannot recognize text drawn as images that would require optical character recognition. I'm interested in software that combines OCR with some sort of math notation rendering engine.
  - espeed 10y ago
    For handwritten character recognition, see: https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/mnist/beginners/ https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/mnist/beginners/ (also google "tensorflow ocr") http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ CROHME: Competition on Recognition of Online Handwritten Mathematical Expressions http://www.isical.ac.in/~crohme/ http://www.isical.ac.in/~crohme/ Closed-sourced API: http://mathpix.com http://mathpix.com https://photomath.net/en/ https://photomath.net/en/ Best off-the-shelf OCR (originally developed by HP, now Google): https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki Two Clojure talks... Machine Learning Live - Mike Anderson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ1qgCr09j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ1qgCr09j8 Adventures in Understanding Documents - Scott Tuddenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94NjRg8zoCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94NjRg8zoCA