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10:02 PM

It seems that allowed-questions would be a reasonable tag for this one. (I have not enough reputation to make edits on meta, so commenting instead.)

Q: Is this question on OCR technology appropriate?

I often end up with PDFs of old math papers and books that are not searchable and cannot be highlighted (basically, they display like images). One way to make them searchable is to apply optical character recognition (OCR). There are several free OCR engines online, but they often limit the size ...

discussion

Also it is a bit unclear.

The last sentence is: "I figured I'd ask here. If people think it's appropriate for MO, I'm happy to migrate."

So it seems the the OP asks two separate things:

1) He asks the question about OCR-ing math papers.

2) He asks whether the question would be appropriate on MO instead of meta.MO.

Martin Sleziak

10:27 PM

In fact, there seems to be a precedent - this question was asked on MO before and it was well-received. (But the site might have evolved since then.)

Q: OCR for handwritten mathematics

I am in the process of scanning a large collection of handwritten notes. They consist of diagrams and formulae with a relatively small proportion of actual words. Of course it would be hopeless to get an OCR program to digest the diagrams or formulae, but it would be useful if I could get one t...