Hi Brett, Matthew, David, Chuck, and Others, The problem is that none of the current iOS OCR programs can input from a PDF file, so the current workaround involves displaying the PDF on the screen and doing a screen capture. Then, you need to use an OCR program that lets you input from your camera roll. David gave the steps for Prizmo (appended below my post). However, if you really want to do an OCR from PDF files, I'd recommend using TextGrabber + Translator by ABBYY instead, because it will involve fewer steps, and also give you slightly better OCR results if you work from screen captures.
Remember that if you are taking screen shots that your screen curtain must be turned off, and your display brightness must be turned up at least above 30 percent. Also, if you have difficulty taking a screen capture by pressing the Home and power buttons at the same time, try starting to press the Home button slightly before the power button, but make sure you do not release it until you can release both buttons, and hear the camera shutter sound that indicates a successful screen capture. TextGrabber does very good OCR, and can process multiple languages -- even more than Prizmo. However, it is more sensitive to exact alignment of images than Prizmo, which is why I don't recommend it if you are trying to OCR from a camera shot, and you are not practiced in taking pictures for OCR without vision. Neither Prizmo nor TextGrabber requires you to orient your images with the top of the page up, and will work with upside-down or 90 degree rotated images; they just won't give good results if you hold your camera skewed. However, if document alignment is not an issue, because you're working from a screen capture or can use an external stand to align your pages, then TextGrabber works well, and you can set it up to OCR your camera roll images faster than you can with Prizmo. Configure TextGrabber by opening the app, and then flicking to the "Settings VF" button at the top of the screen, and double tapping. On the "Settings" screen, flick right to "Enable Crop", which is the second entry under the "Photo" heading. By default this is set with "Switch button, on". If so, double tap to ensure this is set to "Switch button, off". Since cropping images requires interactive sighted adjustment which you won't use, and since your PDF images should already be selected to maximize the content over the screen area, you don't want to use this setting. Turning it off wlll allow you to skip processing steps, which you cannot do with Prizmo. If you want to add OCR recogniztion languages, you can double tap "Recognition Languages" and select additional languages from the alphabetical list of languages by double tapping, then double tap the "Done" button in the top right corner to exit the "Recognition Languages" screen. Exit the "Settings" screen by double tapping the "Done" button in the top right corner. Now when you want to OCR an image, double tap the "Album" button on the main screen and select your image fromt the camera roll. I navigate by moving to the last element with a four finger tap on the bottom of the screen and then a flick left to "Album". On the camera roll, I also usually move to the last element on the screen, and flick left, to get the last image. The nice thing about this TextGrabber configuration is that once you double tap to select an image from your camera roll, you just need to wait a few seconds, and the app immediately processes the image, and you'll hear "Camera" button -- i.e., the "back" button for returning to the camera screen -- when it's done. You can just flick right to read the OCR'd results. If the OCR process takes a while, the intermediate processing screen will say "recognition" if you move to the last element in the bottom right corner. With Prizmo, you have to keep double tapping the "Next" button in the top right corner to take it through the prcessing steps to reach the final result. After viewing the OCR results, I usually just double tap the "menu" button in the bottom right corner of the screen, then flick left to "copy" and double tap. Or, you could email the results to yourself. One final comment: ABBYY now has loads of iOS apps out there that sound as though they might be the one you want, so it's very confusing. The correct app to use for this is: • TextGrabber + Translator (currently $4.99) by ABBYY https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textgrabber/id438475005?mt=8 The other thing is that the price for the TextGrabber app has been bouncing around like crazy in recent months, with high values of $14.99, and a few occasional low values of $0.99. Just two days ago this was $5.99. It has been as high as $19.99. I no longer bother to announce when this app goes down in price, since most people won't use this app. Maybe this will change with the StandScan Pro. There's an earlier write-up of this information in my comment to an AppleVis forum post: • Re: Prizmo Question http://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ios-app-discussion/prizmo-question That includes the instructions for both Prizmo and TextGrabber. HTH. Cheers, Esther > >>>> On Mar 13, 4:19 pm, David Chittenden <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>>> You need to use an OCR package. Voice Dream Reader is not an OCR > >>>>> package. > > >>>>> Prizmo can OCR images from your camera roll. For this solution to work, > >>>>> you need to get the PDF page image into the camera roll. > > >>>>> 1) Open the PDF file. I do this from directly in mail. > > >>>>> 2) Press home and power buttons at the same time to take a screen shot > >>>>> of the first page of the image. The screen shot will be the last photo > >>>>> in your photo album. If there are more than one page in the PDF file: > > >>>>> 3) use a three finger flick up to advance the PDF image to the next > >>>>> page. Follow steps 2 and 3 until pictures have been captured of the > >>>>> entire PDF. > > >>>>> 4) Open Prizmo and select text. > >>>>> 5) Select the OCR from image option. > > >>>>> 6) Remember how many images you captured and count back that many > >>>>> images, or start with an empty photo book. Follow the prompts to OCR > >>>>> the images and save the resulting text files. You will get a separate > >>>>> file for each page. > > >>>>> David Chittenden, MSc, MRCAA > >>>>> Email: [email protected] > >>>>> Mobile: +64 21 2288 288 > >>>>> Sent from my iPhone > > >>>>> On 14/03/2013, at 11:06, Matthew Campbell <[email protected]> > >>>>> wrote: > > >>>>>> Hello all. > >>>>>> I'm just wondering if anyone has found a way to take an image based > >>>>>> pdf file and turn it in to text from an IOS device? I've got text > >>>>>> books from the college that come as image based pdf files and would > >>>>>> like to be able to read them on my iPhone 5 or iPad 2 instead of the > >>>>>> computer. I can do this, but that requires me to use a computer first > >>>>>> to OCR the images of the pages and then save them as text or rtf > >>>>>> files. It'd be nice to skip this step if possible, and would allow me > >>>>>> to study from an IOS device more effectively. > >>>>>> Does VoiceDream maybe do this? > >>>>>> Thanks for any opinions and suggestions. > >>>>>> Matthew Campbell. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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