Re: iPad 3
Wanted to ping the board here to see if there was any chance of a alpha or beta for the PDF / Photo PDF function in the not to distant future. Still very interested.
Some further observations on the feature - I have found that actually exporting out PDFs @ 300 dots per inch allows much more accurate OCR than screen shots (not surprising). So getting high resolution PNGs from exporting all the pages of a PDF, or if there was a way to do the same via some PDF toolkit, seems that that is definitely the way to go.
I continue to be amazed at the accuracy and speed of the OCR. And every time I think there is no real need to have an on the fly OCR experience, I am forever reminded of it's necessity whenever the OCRed text that has not been redacted is brought in. It seems that, unless the text is just flat and clean, with no pictures or shading or font variations, the OCR invariably has a problem. This does not seem to be a just Pleco issue, but can easily reproduced by a number of other OCR software products. Sure you could go through a document using Adobe Acrobat and redact prior to OCR. But even then you do not get the feedback provided by Pleco with regard to character matching via the green overlay.
Three more things -
- I think it would be useful when positioning the box to allow a two-finger automatic positioning of the box. For instance, if an OCRed photo is being evaluated, I would like to be able to create a box that uses my finger position to define the OCR area - the upper left/lower right or lower left/upper right. maybe with some sort of short (1 second?) delay before the green box would be repositioned.
- I brought this up before, and the idea was met with some opposition due to other interface challenges that would occur. But in seeing the benefit of the redaction, I still think it has merit. Specifically, if you have a box on the screen, you should be able to slide the box with your finger. This is especially useful for OCRing areas where there is a repeated collection of text (e.g., questions and answers bundled together). From the GUI perspective, perhaps this could work if the user presses and holds inside the box in an area with no text. The box would turn orange and then could be moved. Tap the box or outside the box (or maybe just release your finger) to put it in normal mode.
- Any way to allow 3 character searches on Plecoforums? Typing "pdf ocr" brings up nothing. I have run into this more than once. I guess it makes sense not to be able to search on "a" or "of" by themselves, but with 3 characters, I would think the search term should be acceptable and useful.