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How hard would it be to do some kind of OCR (maybe combined with machine learning) to “scan” anything that looks like a table into a more accessible format? It
by snazz 7y ago
How hard would it be to do some kind of OCR (maybe combined with machine learning) to “scan” anything that looks like a table into a more accessible format? It seems like there’s a lot of room for ML to improve various aspects of screen readers and other assistive technology.
- dan-robertson 7y agoI claim such a solution would be morally wrong (I am not going to comment on whether such a solution would be good in practice or not) because latex largely throws away the data it has on the table structure and this solution tries to piece it together again. I claim a morally better solution is to have latex not throw away the information it had, but I concede it’s often harder to modify something big and old and complex than to produce something new which is supposed to always work.
- mwcampbell 7y agoReconstructing content and formatting from a PDF through OCR, machine learning, etc. may not be the best possible solution. But it would still make more information accessible to more people. So I must vehemently disagree that it would be morally wrong.
- pishpash 7y agoMorally wrong? What the actual f. The proposed is a perfectly reasonable and decoupled solution that would solve the problem for troves of existing, unstructured paper documents, too. In fact, it likely already exists.
- GavinMcG 7y agoCan you elaborate on the moral principles you're employing here?
- sjy 7y agoI assumed your parent was using 'morally' as it is sometimes used in mathematics: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1434043/sources-of-morality-of-results-in-mathematics https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1434043/sources-of-...
- CrazyCatDog 7y agoAbbyy Finereader does an excellent job
- jointpdf 7y agoTabula does this. There are Python and R wrappers. -Java: https://tabula.technology https://tabula.technology -Python: https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py -R: https://github.com/ropensci/tabulizer https://github.com/ropensci/tabulizer