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getting text from book into a notetaking app
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Posted by dan7000
Sep 13, 2013 at 10:09 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
dan7000 wrote:
>>Then when I find a page I want
>>to copy, I do a screenshot on my iPad (or on my Android tablet I used
>to
>>have a 3d party app for this).
>
>May I ask what that 3rd party Android app was?
Alexander,
Apparently I misremembered. It was actually on my old iPhone that I used a 3rd party app: JotNot Scanner Pro. I did not have a third party app for doing this with Android; apparently I just used the camera on the Android tablet.
Posted by jimspoon
Sep 14, 2013 at 03:13 AM
some recent news pertinent to the topic:
Fujitsu Develops Technology to Correct Curvature in Scanned Images of Book Pages
Overhead scanner captures images of open books or magazines, reproduces a distortion-free image as if scanned from a flat document
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2013/20130710-03.html
Posted by Gary Carson
Sep 14, 2013 at 02:38 PM
Just out of curiosity, what is the average cost of a solution like this? I’m asking because it sounds pretty expensive. You’ve got the cost of the iPhone itself, plus the monthly service charges, the application licenses (if any), and I guess you’d have to add something to reflect the cost of the computer and so on.
I’m just wondering because I like the idea of being able to photograph research documents, but I’d have to basically get everything except the laptop in order to set this up. So far I’ve held the line against getting a smartphone, for instance. They seem incredibly expensive, especially with all the service charges, and I don’t really need one to begin with.
I was thinking I might be able to do the same kind of thing with a digital camera rather than a smartphone, but I’ve tried taking pictures of maps and documents with my camera and getting them in focus was a real problem. Can you really take a clear, focused picture of an entire page of a document with a smartphone?
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 14, 2013 at 04:54 PM
Gary Carson wrote:
>I’m just wondering because I like the idea of being able to photograph
>research documents, but I’d have to basically get everything except the
>laptop in order to set this up. So far I’ve held the line against
>getting a smartphone, for instance. They seem incredibly expensive,
>especially with all the service charges, and I don’t really need one to
>begin with.
With iOS at least there is the option to get an iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the phone. No service charges etc.
But I’m personally skeptical about how effective this sort of notetaking would be in the case of extensive research, taking hundreds of notes from each book on an ongoing basis. E.g. One usually just wants a certain passage, not the text of an entire page. For this reason I’m sticking with dictating quotes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and pasting them directly into the desired software (Freeplane for me initially), as it seems generally quicker. But I can see that the photographic option could be convenient for occasional notetaking.
Posted by Gary Carson
Sep 14, 2013 at 07:10 PM
I use dictation as well (with a voice recorder), but I stopped using Dragon to transcribe my research notes because it has a hard time with unusual names, place names, certain technical terms, etc., especially when I don’t know how to pronounce them in the first place. I tried using the Dragon’s spell command, but the results were erratic at best with a voice recorder. Also, I don’t want to mess around with correcting recognition errors and so on.
I’m still using dictation, but I found an easier method that eliminates the need to transcribe anything. I use a relatively cheap Sony AX412 notetaking MP3 recorder to record my research notes, then I import the recordings into Audio Notetaker. The imports are really simple. I just connect the recorder to my laptop with a USB cable and Audio Notetaker recognizes the device and all of its files. I can then select the files to import and click the import button and it’s done. Audio Notetaker will create separate sections for each file and it will also break each recording into separate sections every time it encounters an index mark. It doesn’t recognize the index marks created by all recorders, but the AX412 works fine.
The process is very simple. Once the recordings have been imported into Audio Notetaker, I can use its controls to jump around in the files and annotate them (or transcribe them manually). Audio Notetaker is a fantastic application for this. You can take notes from a recording, stop and start the playback and jump forward or backward in the file just using keyboard shortcuts. For instance, you can skip from the beginning of a file to the middle or the end and then back again using the arrow keys. You can also highlight important sections of the recording, delete sections, split and merge files, etc. It works really well.
One nice thing about using Audio Notetaker is that I can spell out unusual terms while I’m taking notes and just type the words out while I’m annotating the recording. And there’s no need to dictate punctuation. The text notes can then be exported as a text file or in HTML format. Very nice application.