[Air-L] e-reading limitations

[Emma Duke-Williams]

On 12/10/2007, Cristian Berrio Zapata <CRISTIAN.BERRIO at cable.net.co> wrote:
>
> A little sample of digital divide where we need a free software solution
> (yeah, as in FREE or at least not expensive. Why des not Adobe produce
> something like Microsoft's Campus Agreement so we can access legally their
> products at competitive price. A Vista Pro copy under this license is around
> USD $20).
>

Hi Cristian
I'm not sure about the OCR aspects - as I'm guessing your scanner
mayn't have come with the requisite software - mine had OCR software
with it (though I think that it was designed to be then dumped into a
WordProcessing package, rather than saved as a .TIFF.

A few thoughts though, as it's scanned documents you're talking about,
could you leave Office 2003 on the PC so that you can create the
documents that you want, or are you considering the students that
mayn't be able to read the documents that you create?

As far as the annotating goes, a couple of thoughts - have a look at
Agilix GoBinder - they have a free version. It's designed for a tablet
PC, and it lets you annotate things like Word Docs. I can't remember
the exact details of what it does, as it's on my tablet - which is at
work. However, you can use the mouse to do the annotating, albeit not
as easily as a pointer.
There are other low cost annotation tools designed for tablets which
might work.

Another idea - not sure if it works with Word 2007, as I've only used
it with Word 2003, is to install MS's tool for converting Word Docs to
MS Reader format; as the Reader tool lets you annotate/ make notes in
the books you create. (It's also designed for ease of reading
onscreen, so lets you adjust the contrast between text & background a
lot).

Depending on how much time you've got, perhaps you could scan your
docs & use the scanner's OCR software to dump to word, then save as
Reader format. I suspect, though, that this might take a bit longer
than your older method.

-- 
Emma Duke-Williams:
School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator.
New URL: Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/