Any options besides PDF for mixed language documents?

ficbot · 12-18-2009, 03:23 AM

I picked up a cheap scanner today and I am disappointed. I tried scanning a paperback book in English, and it did a terrible job, lots of weird symbols all over the place. Then I tried the teaching guides which are the main reason I wanted the scanner. What a mess! It seems the problem is that the text is half in French and half in English (e.g. it has prompts in English telling you what to say in French to the kids, for example "say 'je suis ici' while pointing at yourself.") So when I set the scanner to OCR mode and the language was English, I got gibberish. When I set it to French, things improved a little and it got much of it, but the text still needed a lot of cleaning up.

I thought maybe it was just that the software which came with the scanner was not that great. So I downloaded a few utilities which claim to extract text from PDFs. They had great reviews. They totally choked on the French parts.

The PDF looks fine (I made a two-page sampler for testing purposes), but displays a bit too small for easy reading on the Sony. I uploaded it as a PDF, LRF and epub separately. The epub could not zoom at all (i.e. the page stayed looking the same no matter what). The LRF looked just like the PDF on lowest zoom but when I tried to zoom in, the text got garbled as it had when I tried to extract it from the PDF.

So, there are three possibilities here:

1) The scanner is not that great
2) The scanner is fine and I just need better software
3) Dual-language files are too hard and I am stuck with PDF

What do you think? Is there anything I can do here, or will I go to all this work just to wind up with itty bitty text in a PDF file? If so, it may not be worth scanning them all...

Jack Tingle · 12-19-2009, 06:06 PM

Probably 3. Maybe 2. All the scanner does is make a picture, so if you can see the picture, 1 is not it.

OCR software tries to recognize characters from the picture, and then turn them into words from a dictionary. You need two dictionaries, and some kind of referee to tell the OCR which one to use. There may not be such a thing.

Good Luck,
Jack Tingle

12-18-2009, 03:23 AM	#1
ficbot Wizard Posts: 2,409 Karma: 4132096 Join Date: Sep 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite/iOS Kindle App	Any options besides PDF for mixed language documents? I picked up a cheap scanner today and I am disappointed. I tried scanning a paperback book in English, and it did a terrible job, lots of weird symbols all over the place. Then I tried the teaching guides which are the main reason I wanted the scanner. What a mess! It seems the problem is that the text is half in French and half in English (e.g. it has prompts in English telling you what to say in French to the kids, for example "say 'je suis ici' while pointing at yourself.") So when I set the scanner to OCR mode and the language was English, I got gibberish. When I set it to French, things improved a little and it got much of it, but the text still needed a lot of cleaning up. I thought maybe it was just that the software which came with the scanner was not that great. So I downloaded a few utilities which claim to extract text from PDFs. They had great reviews. They totally choked on the French parts. The PDF looks fine (I made a two-page sampler for testing purposes), but displays a bit too small for easy reading on the Sony. I uploaded it as a PDF, LRF and epub separately. The epub could not zoom at all (i.e. the page stayed looking the same no matter what). The LRF looked just like the PDF on lowest zoom but when I tried to zoom in, the text got garbled as it had when I tried to extract it from the PDF. So, there are three possibilities here: 1) The scanner is not that great 2) The scanner is fine and I just need better software 3) Dual-language files are too hard and I am stuck with PDF What do you think? Is there anything I can do here, or will I go to all this work just to wind up with itty bitty text in a PDF file? If so, it may not be worth scanning them all...

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12-19-2009, 06:06 PM	#2
Jack Tingle Punctuation Fetishist Posts: 557 Karma: 1070000 Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: The Bluest Commonwealth In East America Device: Kindle PW, Nexus 7 (2013), Galaxy S5 phone, Galaxy Tab 4 8.0	Probably 3. Maybe 2. All the scanner does is make a picture, so if you can see the picture, 1 is not it. OCR software tries to recognize characters from the picture, and then turn them into words from a dictionary. You need two dictionaries, and some kind of referee to tell the OCR which one to use. There may not be such a thing. Good Luck, Jack Tingle

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