PDF documents, or any other file formats on your computer, are electronically stored information.
Cameras cannot read electronic documents. They are such constructed, they need to "see" things in real, before they can do anything. All electronic formats, be it music, video, documents or just any blah-blah-blah, will have to be processed internally in the computer. To best illustrate things, may I suggest you think of the camera as the "eye" of the computer. Let's at the same time, tell the scanner to be the other "eye" of the PC. The CPU, (or processor), the RAM and any other electronic inside your computer's physical box - well, let's name it the brain. Even so, the hard disk or SSD, which we will compare to your "deep memory". As you well know, your physical eyes cannot "look" inside the brain, and perform anything from within your body. Rather, the eyes can feed the brain with information, which your brain now can process. Back to your query. You will need a camera to feed any written or physically visible information into the computer. Whatever has already been fed into the computer, like an electronically stored document, will be non-interesting for the camera, scanner or any further feeding equipment. All processing of what you have in your brain, will be done by the brain directly. All information already stored on your computer, will be processed directly by the computer, and loaded software. I know, you wanted a quick answer to your question. I just thought it might be helpful for you and others, to have a clarified comprehension of why the answer is the way it stands. To jhust elaborate a tiny bit here, let me in very short terms tell you how any OCR software works. First of all, it needs to retrieve some information. It will typically leave you the chance of defining whether it should grab some electronic document, or if it should contact an external piece of equipment - like a camera or a scanner. To the software, it basically does not matter whichever way you feed it with information. Next, it will start to process the information it has loaded into its memory. All such electronic information is made up of 0's and 1's, also known as pixels. And the software will compare the layout of these, with an internal dictionary. The dictionary will be like a tremendous collection of stencils. If the OCR finds that a set of dots (or pixels) in the received information matches any stencil in the dictionary, it will know what character this will represent. It now will "type" this character into a virtual document, thereby imitating you pressing a key on the keyboard. Finally, when it has finished the whole loaded information, it will present you with the virtually typed document. For your information, in old times, the stencil-lookup was pretty much a one-to-one comparison. That means, it would need a match that would be very close to the exact stenciled shape. If it was to recognize anything to be the letter O, it would need a set of pixels in a perfect circle. Modern OCR software has become far mor "inteligent", whatever we want to talk about inteligence when comes to silly electronic units like a computer. The inteligence is that the OCR no longer will depend on close to exact matches. To a very high degree, it might "look" at the properties of a scanned character, and base its recognition on the results thereof. For instance, it would conclude that a set of pixels that resemble two parallel vertical lines, slightly spaced from each other, with a horizontal line running just about mid-way up between the verticals - all in all will be interpreted as the capitalized letter H. Likewise, a vertical bar, with a tiny line pointing diagonally out from the upper left end, will likely be told to be the number 1. As you might understand, such propetary comparison will be more forgiving, than if you were to compare exact matches. You no longer need to define how high the character can be, or what the width should be. The OCR can "see" this is the number 9, big or small print, simply by recognizing the shape and other properties of the character. This is one of the reasons, modern OCR can perform high degrees of faultless recognition. In the old days of the 80's, often a number 9, and the lower-case G, would be confusingly recognized as either, due to the fact that they quite much would resemble similar pixel-patterns. to improve the OCR recognition, modern OCR software further will hold comprehensive dictionaries for spelling, in several languages. It is considered very little likely, that any word in English would be: log9ing, so the OCR will recognize this as if it was a common typo, and replace the 9 with a g, making the word: logging, which happens to be a validly spelled English word. Since they now aday do propetary stencilized OCR, they also can perform recognition of hand-writing. At least, to a certain degree. Simply by attempting to recognize the shape and general makeup of the lines on the paper, the OCR will conclude that your droddle "pretty much looks like" a given character. By correcting the software whenever it performs the wrong recognition, it eventually will "learn" the style of your hand-writing. Such correction is what is known as training the software. Hope all of this was of any help and interest to you, or others. David On 11/28/2017 6:23 PM, Robert Ringwald via Talk wrote: > I do not have a smart phone. In order to use the KNFB program to just > read PDF's on the computer, do I need a camera? Or can it be done > internally within the computer? > > Windows 10. > > > > > Bob Ringwald piano, Solo, Duo, Trio, Quartet, Quintet > Fulton Street Jazz Band (Dixieland/Swing) > 916/ 806-9551 > Check out my performing schedule: www.ringwald.com/schedule.php > Amateur (ham) Radio Station K6YBV > > “If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, > if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” -- Mark Twain > > > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > > _______________________________________________ > Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the > author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared. > > For membership options, visit > http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/trailerdavid%40hotmail.com. > For subscription options, visit > http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com > List archives can be found at > http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com _______________________________________________ Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared. 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