Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>> But how can I turn the text into a "podcast" for her to listen to?
>> And would it be too large to email to her in a typical email message?
>
> iOS has very good accessibility features. I suspect it already can read any
> pdf you provide.

Thanks for that suggestion where the main goal is one way for everything.
She will get super confused if there isn't one way for everything.

Not one way for this kind of PDF. Another for that kind of PDF.
And yet another for text. And another for HTML. And so on.

It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).

For the bitmaps, I was thinking of looking up OCR or, if it's short, just
reading it aloud to myself and recording it on my phone's voice recorder.

> https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3e2e415f/ios

Thanks for that suggestion since she only has iOS iPhones & iPads.
And I don't.

I looked at that page which seems to be much like what Windows does.
Which means it will drive any normal person nuts with extraneous talking.

It has to be an audio of the text only and nothing else for it to work.
The firefox text-only speaking suggestion from Paul is along those lines.
--
Removed android and replaced it with Firefox since the solution is there.

Peter <occassionally-confused@nospam.co.uk> wrote:
> Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> But how can I turn the text into a "podcast" for her to listen to?
>>> And would it be too large to email to her in a typical email message?
>>
>> iOS has very good accessibility features. I suspect it already can read any
>> pdf you provide.
>
> Thanks for that suggestion where the main goal is one way for everything.
> She will get super confused if there isn't one way for everything.

Don't think that's possible. There will always be exceptions, but I guess
you/her need to decide which option has the fewest exceptions.

> Not one way for this kind of PDF. Another for that kind of PDF.
> And yet another for text. And another for HTML. And so on.
>
> It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
> matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).

Unless it's very old pdfs the usual is certainly not bitmap pdfs

> For the bitmaps, I was thinking of looking up OCR or, if it's short, just
> reading it aloud to myself and recording it on my phone's voice recorder.

How is that "one way for everything"? A screen reader would be far more
consistent and quicker for you.

>> https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3e2e415f/ios
>
> Thanks for that suggestion since she only has iOS iPhones & iPads.
> And I don't.
>
> I looked at that page which seems to be much like what Windows does.
> Which means it will drive any normal person nuts with extraneous talking.

People with visual impairment need that extraneous talking.

> It has to be an audio of the text only and nothing else for it to work.
> The firefox text-only speaking suggestion from Paul is along those lines.

Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
>> matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).
>
> Unless it's very old pdfs the usual is certainly not bitmap pdfs

There is probably a program to automatically OCR a file that is really an
image of the text. It's not really a PDF. It's more like an image of a PDF.

On 06/15/2023 12:19 PM, Peter wrote:
> Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
>>> matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).
>>
>> Unless it's very old pdfs the usual is certainly not bitmap pdfs
>
> There is probably a program to automatically OCR a file that is really an
> image of the text. It's not really a PDF. It's more like an image of a PDF.
A quick Google, seems to indicate that OCR is part of the professional
reader, ot a paid subscription

On 6/15/2023 12:34 PM, knuttle wrote:
> On 06/15/2023 12:19 PM, Peter wrote:
>> Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
>>>> matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).
>>>
>>> Unless it's very old pdfs the usual is certainly not bitmap pdfs
>>
>> There is probably a program to automatically OCR a file that is really an
>> image of the text. It's not really a PDF. It's more like an image of a PDF.
>
> A quick Google, seems to indicate that OCR is part of the professional reader, ot a paid subscription

A PDF can be OCR-processed and have a "character overlay" done
by the OCR software. You can for example, wipe over the
new overlay with a mouse, then copy and paste the text, elsewhere.
This could also cause a font to be defined in the PDF, which will
show in the Properties of the document, where previously the
document had absolutely no fonts referenced.

The other kind of OCR, would be runtime OCR of some sort.

Bitmap-only PDFs come from cheap scanners. A scanner with
more software capability, can do the text overlay thing. An Adobe PDF
product can do OCR. My Acrobat Reader 4 or so (ancient), had OCR, but
the resolution of the bitmap PDF had to be between 200DPI and 400 DPI
or so. In fact, it did not like higher resolution scans to be offered
to it, which was a major nuisance.

Linux has Tesseract, and that would be an example of a keyword to use
when researching various PDF softwares there.

*******

You can deconstruct a PDF various ways.

mutool.exe extract example.pdf

would draw out the bitmaps for you, and save as image files.

That's not particularly useful as some sort of workflow.
It's mainly for the user to have a better understanding
of the PDF type in front of them.

In this example, the PDF file has no fonts. The document is
ten pages. There happen to be ten output images.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/WbY3MkBR/bitmap-pdf-sample.gif

Now, I process it:

D:\>mutool extract sony_srs-t1_t1pc_sm.pdf
extracting image-0001.png
extracting image-0014.png
extracting image-0019.png
extracting image-0024.png
extracting image-0029.png
extracting image-0034.png
extracting image-0039.png
extracting image-0044.png
extracting image-0049.png
extracting image-0054.png

Properties show:

image-0044.png (document page 8)

dimensions 6600 x 4529 17"x11" est. 388 dpi
8 bit depth (likely grayscale in this case)
421 KB (some decent compression)

On Ubuntu, using the keyword, I can find:

ocrmypdf - add an OCR text layer to PDF files

We give it a try.

ocrmypdf -l eng --image-dpi 400 --output-type pdf image-0044.png image-0044.pdf
INFO - Input file is not a PDF, checking if it is an image...
INFO - Input file is an image
INFO - Image seems valid. Try converting to PDF...
INFO - Successfully converted to PDF, processing...
Scan: 100% 1/1 [00:00<00:00, 625.83page/s]
INFO - Using Tesseract OpenMP thread limit 3
OCR: 100% 1.0/1.0 [00:07<00:00, 7.01s/page]
JPEGs: 0image [00:00, ?image/s]
JBIG2: 0item [00:00, ?item/s]
INFO - Optimize ratio: 1.00 savings: 0.0%

Wiping over the output PDF file image-0044.pdf reveals text is there.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/76gvZFkP/bitmap-pdf-output.gif

The OCR step in this case, was done in bash shell in Win11.
So I didn't even need a VM like VBox to do it.

Paul

On 15/06/2023 17:19, Peter wrote:
> Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It has to be ONE way for EVERYTHING, where there's no way any program, no
>>> matter how smart it is, can read out ALL PDFs (since many are bitmaps).
>>
>> Unless it's very old pdfs the usual is certainly not bitmap pdfs
>
> There is probably a program to automatically OCR a file that is really an
> image of the text. It's not really a PDF. It's more like an image of a PDF.
>
Actually its a pdf of an image (usually a scan of a printed page). There
are hundreds of programs to OCR text images in pdf or image files, many
of them freeware. Many pdf readers include an OCR function - I use
PDF-XChange Viewer.

knuttle <keith_nuttle@yahoo.com> wrote
> A quick Google, seems to indicate that OCR is part of the professional
> reader, ot a paid subscription

I have Adobe Acrobat 6, which is a decade or more old but I tried that
after seeing your suggestion about the "professional reader" (which doesn't
really make sense to me as the professional is a writer and not a reader).

Adobe Acrobat 6 Standard has a line item menu for
"Document > Paper Capture > Start Capture" and then a choice of
All pages, Current page, and From Page x to y

The default "Paper Capture Settings" language is
"Primary OCR Language = English"
(although you can set any language in their long list).

The default "Paper Capture Settings" "PDF Output Style" is set to
"Searchable Image (Exact)"
But there were options of "Searchable Image (Compact)" & an option for
"Formatted Text and Graphics".

The default "Paper Capture Settings" "Downsample Images" dpi is set to
"None" but there were options for "Low (300 dpi)", "Medium (150 dpi)",
and "High (72 dpi)".
I thought I was heading toward the finish line when I tried it on a sample
full text page of a 200 page document whose text I couldn't select - but
the professional Adobe Acrobat 6 Paper Capture feature erred out saying
"Acrobat could not run Paper Capture on the page because
of the following error: This page contains renderable text."

I thought I'd be sneaky and run the Adobe Acrobat Professional feature of
"File > Reduce File Size > Compatible with Acrobat 4.0 and later"
But it erred out in trying to convert the PDF to Acrobat 4 saying
"This PDF cannot be made compatible with Acrobat 4.0 because it uses
transparency.", however it did convert to Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0 versions.

Unfortunately I wasn't sneaky enough as it still complained that
"This page contains renderable text."

Only did it slowly dawn on me that if the file contains "renderable text",
then maybe I could just save the entire file to plain text, which worked.

Which means there must be at least 3 kinds of PDF text documents at least
Real PDF (with selectable text which we can presume can be OCR'd)
Renderable text (without selectable text which can't be OCR'd apparently)
Bitmap text (without selectable text which we can presume can be OCR'd)

Being confused how to tell which is which, I dug up a PDF where I could
select the text, and THAT was able to be OCR'd by the professional Acrobat.
Paper Capture
"Rasterizing page and sending to Paper Capture..."
Performing page recognition
Converting to indexed color
Thresholding image
Deskewing image
Finding rules and frames
Reading characters
Forming words
Grouping characters and words
Writing ACP file
Do you want to save the changes to "file.pdf" before closing?

But where's the OCR results?
--
fup set to replace firefox with r.p.d instead.

> ...a program to automatically OCR a file that is really an
> image of the text.

PDF-XChange Editor Portable (free)
https://portableapps.com/apps/office/pdf-xchange-editor-portable

Convert -> OCR Page(s)-> All