PDF to LaTeX

[Fabián Mancilla]

Hi! I was looking information about convert pdf document to latex.
This is an older discussion but I think that the following information
maybe will be usefull.

Exist a software (InftyReader) that convert pdf files into several
pictures (depending of pages number) and provide a tex file. The text
and the math expressions are pretty recognized. The performance of
this software its very amazing.

A demo is available for 15 days. The page is:
http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html#InftyReader

Regards,

Fabián

Fragment of the older discussion:

>> Is there any easy way to convert pdf document to latex. I can copy the
>> sentences from pdf and paste it in the latex. But the problem is with
>> the mathematical expressions. Is there any easy way to do this job?
> Use 'pdftotext filename.pdf'

Doing so, he won't have to copy-n-paste text by himself : this
programm only extract textual content (as far i can remember).
There are tools to also extract images and fonts informations (so the
PDF can be converted to RTF or maybe TeX or DVI), but as it's no
descriptive/semantic tagging you can't convert back to LaTaX or XML
or
alikes. To short, you may have mathematical expression either as
image
or text (i means characters with associeted visual glyphs but nothing
suitable for LaTeX or even a mathematical-assistance-software like
Mathematica or Maple)

[Peter Flynn]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Fabián Mancilla <mancill...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi! I was looking information about convert pdf document to latex.
This is an older discussion but I think that the following information
maybe will be usefull.

Exist a software (InftyReader) that convert pdf files into several
pictures (depending of pages number) and provide a tex file. The text
and the math expressions are pretty recognized. The performance of
this software its very amazing.

I saw an earlier version of this, and it looked promising. Maybe they have fixed the errors now. But after the free trial it's expensive ($800 for a perpetual licence; or $180 per year for a renewable license, plus the cost of the FineReader OCR engine plugin, $300). The free trial does not include the cost of the FineReader OCR engine plugin, which you have to buy. The biggest drawback is that it's Windows-only. If you have very large amounts of conversion, this is quite a good idea if you can justify the cost, but for small quantities it will not be economic after the 15 days free.

///Peter

[Gildas Cotomale]

> Exist a software (InftyReader) that convert pdf files into several
> pictures (depending of pages number) and provide a tex file.

Well. But there's a LaTeX's package that let you "include" PDF pages
like images... Why then convert pdf files to images ? And if there are
valuable reason to do that, why one should buy a software instead of
using open and free tool available on much more plateforms ?