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Stupid question, how well would this work on a PDF of a latex document? This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non-accessable, and I

Stupid question, how well would this work on a PDF of a latex document? This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non-accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex from them, which is often lost.

JBorrow 9y ago
Isn't that the whole point of this utility? Or am I missing something?
- CJefferson 9y ago
  Well I was hoping it could take a while page, rather than require me to cut out the equations.
  - kqr 9y ago
    I may be naive here, but is there anything preventing running regular OCR over a page, and then feeding whatever it couldn't deal with into this? Sure, the plumbing for this is probably missing, but it sounds more like a matter of picking up the shovel rather than inventing something.
    - froindt 9y ago
      I've done some work cleaning up documents for use by a blind student. OCR starts to fail really badly when math is involved. Common errors like O versus 0, any accents or additions to characters, small formulas embedded in sentences, graphs with captions, etc. Can all throw things off considerably. Best case I could copy and paste paragraphs at a time from a PDF of the textbook (with copy protection removed). Worst case I was retyping or fixing every few words in a sentence. I was working on this from about 2011-2013. Advances with image processing and machine learning have been significant since then, so there may be much better software available now. If anyone has ideas or packages they'd recommend, I'd be interested.
  - mkl 9y ago
    InftyReader [1] does this. Its results are good but definitely not perfect. Unfortunately it is seriously expensive, at US $400 per computer. [1] http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html#InftyReader http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html#InftyReader
tgb 9y ago
As someone who writes with Latex, thanks for pointing out this problem, I hadn't considered it.
froindt 9y ago
> This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non-accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex from them, which is often lost. Many years ago I "translated" course materials into a form which was accessible to a blind grad student. It was a really interesting job and taught me a lot about accessibility. I was effectively doing latex, but without all the leading \ characters. It made learning latex comparatively easy. What interface do you use to read equations? Screen reader speaking the straight latex, or do you have some Middleware to make it more digestible when listened to?
- CJefferson 9y ago
  I'm not blind, but I have a blind PhD. He seems most happy with just straight latex. I suspect this is because it strikes a good balance between requiring little work for him, or others, as it usually already exists.
ocrcustomserver 9y ago
It's not a stupid question. You need equation detection + equation OCR. Mathpix only does the equation OCR part. I've worked on this (for a PDF to HTML application), mail is in profile if you're interested.

JBorrow 9y ago

Isn't that the whole point of this utility? Or am I missing something?

CJefferson 9y ago
Well I was hoping it could take a while page, rather than require me to cut out the equations.
- kqr 9y ago
  I may be naive here, but is there anything preventing running regular OCR over a page, and then feeding whatever it couldn't deal with into this? Sure, the plumbing for this is probably missing, but it sounds more like a matter of picking up the shovel rather than inventing something.
  - froindt 9y ago
    I've done some work cleaning up documents for use by a blind student. OCR starts to fail really badly when math is involved. Common errors like O versus 0, any accents or additions to characters, small formulas embedded in sentences, graphs with captions, etc. Can all throw things off considerably. Best case I could copy and paste paragraphs at a time from a PDF of the textbook (with copy protection removed). Worst case I was retyping or fixing every few words in a sentence. I was working on this from about 2011-2013. Advances with image processing and machine learning have been significant since then, so there may be much better software available now. If anyone has ideas or packages they'd recommend, I'd be interested.
- mkl 9y ago
  InftyReader [1] does this. Its results are good but definitely not perfect. Unfortunately it is seriously expensive, at US $400 per computer. [1] http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html#InftyReader http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html#InftyReader

tgb 9y ago

As someone who writes with Latex, thanks for pointing out this problem, I hadn't considered it.

froindt 9y ago

> This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non-accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex from them, which is often lost. Many years ago I "translated" course materials into a form which was accessible to a blind grad student. It was a really interesting job and taught me a lot about accessibility. I was effectively doing latex, but without all the leading \ characters. It made learning latex comparatively easy. What interface do you use to read equations? Screen reader speaking the straight latex, or do you have some Middleware to make it more digestible when listened to?

CJefferson 9y ago
I'm not blind, but I have a blind PhD. He seems most happy with just straight latex. I suspect this is because it strikes a good balance between requiring little work for him, or others, as it usually already exists.

ocrcustomserver 9y ago

It's not a stupid question. You need equation detection + equation OCR. Mathpix only does the equation OCR part. I've worked on this (for a PDF to HTML application), mail is in profile if you're interested.