My university was kind enough to sent me my textbook as a picture pdf. Usually it is a document pdf, from which I can copy the characters directly into Skritter. Since all the pages are pictures it is impossible now.

They say it is the only format they have the textbook in.

Does anyone know of a method of converting the "picture" characters into "typed" characters?

Thus far entering the pinyin was very frustrating and unsatisfactory.

Hope someone can help!

Cheers

@aharlekyn,

ABBY FineReader, an OCR (optical character recognition) program is excellent for that. You can scan the whole PDF, but there's also a screen capture utility - it works like the Windows snipping tool, except that it feeds into the OCR engine, then copies the text to your clipboard. It isn't free software, but they do have a trial version, and you could probably take care of your entire book within that period. You'd probably use the screen capture feature, as the PDF conversion tool is limited in the trial version to the length it processes. I purchased the full software myself, and I use it regularly when I'm reading e-books and magazines.

Pleco iPhone with OCR module will do a whole page for you at once.

@Neil,

Does the iphone module directly do pdf's, or would you have to take a picture of the screen?

Chris

either take a photo or load an image from your phone memory. you could therefore do a print screen of the pdf to get it in, and this gives you the chance to remove borders, images and other distractions which will generate random characters.

photos of a whole page of printed text is great, as long as there are no shadows. photo of computer screen is dodgy.

Thanks! Downloading the trail at the moment. You are a life saver!

Chris, I seem to have only some success. Maybe I am not using it right. Could you explain to me how to use the screen capture utility?

It only seem to recognize half of the characters. The rest is gibberish.

Three things to watch for:

1) Make sure to select the correct language in the drop down (i.e, Traditional Chinese).
2) You'll have your best luck if you get a good box around just the text that needs to be read.
3) If the scan quality is poor, you're probably out of luck. I've only had success with ebooks (which have pretty much perfect quality) and high quality scans of documents using a desktop scanner - carefully photographing a magazine in macro mode, for instance, doesn't yield usable results.

Good luck!

Chris