Re: Scanning mathematical text

Re: Scanning mathematical text

[Paul Taylor]

As Charles Wells said (embedded in his message),
	scanning would not be worth it

Even translating MicroSoft Word into LaTeX (which I helped other people
to do with Steve Vickers' book "Reasonned Programming") is vastly more
trouble than retyping in LaTeX directly.  (Except perhaps for plain text,
in which case you might as well have used Word to save it in plain text,
or, better, not used Word in the first place.)

In fact I have a recollection of making a resolution that (not only would
I not do such a traslation but that) I would never again help someone with
a LaTeX document that had resulted from such a translation.

Honestly.

When you're pulled all your hair out with the frustration of trying to
do all the necessary incidental corrections,  remember what I said.

Paul

Scanning mathematical text

[Charles Wells]

Steve Vickers raised the possibility of scanning mathematical text as a
start toward getting it into TeX form.  I thought I would report on my
experience with getting Triples, Toposes and Theories onto the web.  

Some dozens of pages were missing from the original TeX computer file.  I
retyped some of them and I scanned some of them and then turned the special
symbols into TeX notation when the OCR program said it didn't understand.
Scanning works fine and is faster than retyping (for me) if the
mathematical symbolism is not too dense.  Most of the part I had to redo
WAS too dense, and scanning those pages took me about the same length of
time as retyping them.  Michael Barr had retyped the diagrams so they
didn't slow me down. 

If I typed maybe 25% faster than I do scanning would not be worth it except
for things like the introduction and historical notes.  

If you do want to scan, get good software.  I use Omnipage Pro 10.0 which
you can get from 

http://www.caere.com/products/omnipage/pro/ 

for $500, but if you bought a scanner with a free version of Omnipage you
can upgrade for $100.  Do not try to use the free version, it is worth what
it costs.  Academic pricing might be lower.  There are probably other good
scanning programs out there but I don't know anything about them.




Charles Wells, 105 South Cedar St., Oberlin, Ohio 44074, USA.
email: charles@freude.com. 
home phone: 440 774 1926.  
professional website: http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/math/wells/home.html
personal website: http://www.oberlin.net/~cwells/index.html
NE Ohio Sacred Harp website: http://www.oberlin.net/~cwells/sh.htm