Hi Thomas and Chris, Sorry I didn't realise it only took the details of a single screen rather than a whole document. I was hoping it would OCR the whole document and then there would be a way of copying the results to the clip board so it could be pasted to notepad/word or some equivalent program as a text document for easy access another time. I think my hope was that if the above had worked you could have downloaded the demo of jaws run the OCR program once saved the results to a text document compatible with Linics and then never had to use jaws again. Sorry it looks like scanning the books really is the only way then, but I've enjoyed the topic and learnt lots about role play , religion , science, torrents and even the Olympics anyway
All the best -----Original Message----- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: 21 June 2012 21:01 To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Redistributing RPG Source Books Hi Paul, That wouldn't work for a number of reasons. First, I'm not a Jaws user, and haven't been for years. Not since switching to Linux full time at any rate. My Jaws SMA ran out a long time ago, and I have absolutely no desire to renew it. These days I primarily use NVDA when I use Windows, and it serves most of my needs. So for me paying for a new Jaws upgrade and SMA just for the OCR feature wouldn't be cost effective since that would be the one and only thing I'd be buying Jaws for. That defeats the entire reason I switched to open source software which was to save money. Second, the feature you are talking about isn't the same as scanning a book with an OCR program like Openbook. The OCR feature in Jaws 13 takes a screen shot of the screen you are on, takes that image, runs it through a little OCR program, and stores it in a virtual buffer. Once it is done processing the screen you can review the screen with the Jaws cursor. I don't know if a person can copy the text to the clipboard or to Notepad or not, but I don't see it being very effective in terms of reading sourcebooks. The problem here is that roll playing game sourcebooks are like any other reference guide. Its not the kind of book you pick up and begin reading from page 1 to page 365 like a novel. A gamemaster has to be able to look at the table of contents to find the certain rules, stats, classes, whatever he is looking for and then immediately turn to that page or chapter. That's kind of hard to do if Jaws won't read a thing until each page has to be scanned and processed every time you open the book and look for something. At least if I scan a book using Openbook, Omnipage, Simple Scan, or some other OCR program I can save it as a text document. I can then open it in a text editor and use the find command to jump directly to the section or sections I'm looking for without having to have Jaws sscan a page, see if that is what I want, jump a few more screens into the pdf, scan another page, etc. That's like totally unproductive. Finally, when Jaws takes a screen shot of the screen and runs it through its little OCR program it doesn't do any kind of proofreading on the scan. In other words its just a flat scan meant to give a user an idea of what is on the screen. It was not intended to read books and therefore I figure a lot of the terminology and names in the Star Wars books wouldn't be recognized properly and there would be no way to spell check and proofread the mistakes made by the Jaws OCR program without copying it into Notepad or something and editing them by hand. Which of course brings us right back to scanning it into Openbook, Omnipage, Simple Scan OCR, or whatever and manually cleaning up the text anyway. I hope this doesn't sound rude, but I think it is just a bad idea all around. It just wouldn't work out for me for several reasons. :D Cheers! On 6/21/12, Paul Lemm <paul.l...@sky.com> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > I don't know if it will help or not but I'm looking at upgrading to windows > 7 and due to this need to change the version of jaws I use. Whilst > checking > out the new features in jaws 13 I came across a function where jaws will > using OCR detect text in images and read as text. So if you had a pdf file > that is just an image jaws can now read the text. Although I'm sure you > don't want to go out and pay how ever much jaws is just to read your star > wars books I wonder if this will let you convert the star wars PDF that > are just images to text and then let you save the converted file. Like I > said I only read about it today so don't know if it has any limitations or > not but just thought if it does work it might save you having to manually > scan all the books and I think you can download a demo version (from memory > it lets you run the program in 45 mins before you need to restart to use > again) > > Apparently the same feature will allow you to read things like DVD menus > and > other applications where text is an image rather than text. This in mind I > wonder whether this could make some main stream games that are very textual > more accessible, if so it could be very interesting and open more games > accessible to people with sight problems > > Anyway hope this helps and I'm not just going on about technology everyone > already knows about and either doesn't do what I think it does or just > isn't that good. > > > Paul lemm > --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. 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