One of my least favorite work-related activities is taking documents that, for whatever reason, exist only as printed copies and scanning them into electronic files. This is a process that should be relatively simple, but which is rendered almost impossible by lousy text recognition software that can’t recognize certain characters, rearranges page format and layout, and transforms tables, equations, and figures into an incomprehensible mess that I then have to wade through and correct. This is both tedious and time-consuming, and, no matter how much I am able to finish, there is always more waiting for me.
In front of me now, I have page after page of equations — thirty pages left in all — which shouldn’t, but do, look like this:
J+1
J+l J+1 IN )i
Tia A & #64979; ggi
IE& #64979; tE 1 2 (A& #64979;6)
V
So I have to go through each page and correct the formatting, proofread for errors which are almost always there, and spend hours retyping equations that I do not understand, and which are often as difficult to read as they are to reproduce. I think I — and, by extension, my boss — will just have to accept that this is not something that can easily be finished in just one or two days. This is not a simple scan-and-save. This is an undertaking. And, frankly, it’s beginning to piss me off.