Re: [Corpora-List] pdfs/ OCR question

From: Alexandre Rafalovitch (arafalov@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Dec 11 2006 - 17:21:49 MET

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    I would guess that the OCR had been done by the software that
    generated the PDF. You might be able to check what it is by looking at
    PDF document's properties. The text is stored on a separate layer from
    the image and the reader just does region matching for the selection
    purposes.

    If you need to have this fixed, you probably will need to burst out
    the PDF into its page images and have those re-OCRed.

    Software you might find useful include PDFBox (http://www.pdfbox.org/)
    and Gamera (http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/gamera/)

    You can also look at the Distributed Proofreaders to see if there is
    anything to be learned from their experience: http://www.pgdp.net/

    Regards,
       Alex.

    On 12/11/06, Hunter, Duncan <D.I.Hunter@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
    > Quick question about pdfs/ OCR:
    >
    > Some text is copied and from a pdf file and pasted into a text or Word file.
    > It contains errors- say, for example, 'the' has become 'die' (you notice
    > that in the original pdf the 't' and 'h' are quite close together). At what
    > stage has this misrecognition/ miscopying occured?
    > Where does the OCR take place? The OCR functionality is, presumably, part
    > of of the .pdf reader software itself?
    >
    > Can anything be done to deal with the problem?
    >
    > Duncan Hunter
    >
    >



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