[Blindapple] Converting PDF docs

Tony Baechler tony at baechler.net
Fri Jul 21 11:45:52 EDT 2017


Hi all,

Is anyone interested in this? On asimov, there are a lot of Apple docs, like 
magazines, books, manuals, etc. Many are in the .pdf format. I've converted 
them to plain text. The quality varies. It looks like in most cases, the 
text is from OCR and hasn't been checked. Some magazines are only page 
images and have no text at all. If there is interest, it would be nice to 
get OCR done on them. Due to my lack of time, I don't know when I'll get to 
them. I'm looking for people to do the OCR on the page images and possibly 
redo the OCR on the texts which need work. I haven't looked at most of the 
files. The pdf to text was an automated conversion.

While not related to the blind, having them in plain text at least makes 
them easier to read. There are some interesting articles in the magazines. 
Tom Zuchowski, better known for Eamon in its later years, contributed a 
number of articles. Some of the ads might be fun for nostalgia. If there is 
interest, I can zip the text files and upload them somewhere. As I said, the 
PDFs are on asimov for anyone to grab if you want to look. There are some 
audio files as well, such as podcasts. You can even read the Applesoft 
source if you look around.



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