It is really very simple.
An empty document is just a picture of a document. Unlike a text document as
say created in Word where each letter is represented by a distinct computer
number which leaves no ambiguity about what that computer number represents,
a picture of a document is a series of darker and lighter smudges on a
screen.
When you print it you form a facsimile of the image. when you scan that with
an OCR programme like K1000 or Open Book or Abbey reader or omnipro the
image is processed and the programme attempts to recognize patterns it can
recognize as letters and spaces.
When you use the so-called virtual printer you are just telling K1000 or
Open Book to use that PDF picture of the document rather than print and
acquire another picture of the printed document from the scanner.
How good the OCR will be depends on the quality of the image. It should be
better direct from the PDF than printing and rescanning the picture as a
certain amount of quality will be lost at each conversion between formats.
Where the original electronic version, that is the file created by the word
processor is not available an image is the only alternative for sending the
document. The sender could print and scan and OCR the document of course
complete with the errors their program might introduce.
Those digitized documents from archives are all images, pictures of the
original complete with doodles in the margins, coffee stains and thumb
prints and all. They are not retyped documents. They might as well be .GIF
or .JPG images.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marilyn Walker" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 4:25 PM
Subject: Re: [JAWS-Users] Adobe saying empty document
Mike, I had this happen to me last week when I tried to access a pdf
document from the University of IllinoisHistorical archives. It seemed
that
the pages, labeled "graphical" were probably scanned document pages that
may
have been digitized. So, as a last resort, I tried the Kurzweil 1000
virtual printer and that opened the document. However, unlike other
pdf's,
this large file reads very slowly with my using the down arrow keys and I
find that normal K1000navigation such as "go to page" scarcely work.
Maybe
there is something I need to know about digitized pages because the time
consumed was really intolerable. marilyn
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