[sdiy] Can anyone OCR the AN23.PDF File Here?

[Barry Klein]

I don’t think the issue is whether it can be made into a PDF.  It is whether it can be made into a popular ebook format.
To do this, my understanding is that you run something like Acrobat for OCR, then worry about fonts, OCR accuracy, and the images.
The way Acrobat seems to work is that it scans the document in OCR mode and assigns images to each character.  In one of my scans it scanned a uppercase “C” with a little black mark from a character nearby.
So every uppercase C had that black mark and I found no way to edit the baseline C image to get rid of it.   My pages had a variety of fonts and Acrobat couldn’t handle that well.  As we said earlier, images like schematics have to be captured as a bitmapped image and inserted into a text page – probably manually.
I have PDF images of my book.  I was getting them printed from the PDF.  But to sell your ebook on Amazon or many other ebook outlets a PDF is not acceptable.  It could be said that people would pay for a PDF even though it could be copied.  The O’Reilly books I mentioned earlier can be downloaded after purchase in PDF form so many authors are open to the idea.
My books were scanned by Western Digital’s (former employer) internal printing service.  They had a machine that you just feed in the originals and it scans both sides of hundreds of pages very quickly.
Besides the downside of PDF copying, you don’t get exposure by Amazon as they don’t support sales of PDF versions.
As you can see, we already have people that have access to the PDF making systems and think they are doing the world a favor by then copying the work and releasing it free.
Like Bernie, I wasn’t making much per book after printing costs and manual labor.  Shipping costs have become too high for book shipments overseas or even to Canada.  
If Amazon were to offer books in PDF I’d probably do it.  Better than nothing happening at all.  
Barry
From: David G Dixon 
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2017 6:46 AM
To: 'Bernard Arthur Hutchins Jr' ; synth-diy at synth-diy.org 
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Can anyone OCR the AN23.PDF File Here?

Great post!

I work at a university.  Our department has two big copy machines.  I could feed 100 pages of Electronotes in and have a PDF of it on my laptop in about 2 minutes.  I may do this for some things, because I like to read this stuff when I travel and I can't really carry 6000 pages around Europe or South America in my carry-on luggage.

Basically, I'd be happy to do this just for my own purposes, and then email the scan files to Bernie Hutchins for free.  That's the context that's missing from ENWN49 -- he wouldn't have to pay anyone anything at all to do this.  There are dozens of people out here in web-land that would do it for free just for yuks.  I'm currently on sabbatical, so have lots of free time to stand at a copy machine.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] On Behalf Of Bernard Arthur Hutchins Jr
  Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2017 9:35 PM
  To: synth-diy at synth-diy.org
  Subject: [sdiy] Can anyone OCR the AN23.PDF File Here?


  Here is a brand new Electronotes webnote with regard to digital conversion.  It includes a test PDF scan of an app note (AN23) with my failure to get anything usable baring extensive editing.  Can anyone get an acceptable automated conversion?





  http://electronotes.netfirms.com/ENWN49.pdf




  Thanks     -Bernie



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