Re: Scanning mathematical text
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
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
participants (2)
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Charles Wells -
Paul Taylor