Overview

A scanned PDF is not accessible to assistive technologies and can pose as a barrier for students with disabilities. Sometimes faculty may have older documents that have been scanned and saved as PDFs, provide handwritten notes or solutions. It is relatively quick to convert PDFs into a Word document and add the math via MathML.

Goal: After reviewing this page, participants will be able to determine a workflow to convert a PDF with math to MS Word. Additionally, this workflow could be applied for converting documents with handwritten notes.

Programs that can help the process

EquatIO is a screenshot reader that allows users to screenshot math equations or expressions, and paste it into other editors. MathML and LaTeX are supported. At this time, the program can only do one equation at a time.
Software Needed / Recommended has additional resources that can help speed the process along.
MathPix is a tool that can screenshot any math and have it rendered to a variety of formats. Export images and PDFs to LaTex, DOCX, Overleaf, Markdown, Excel, ChemDraw and more, with our AI powered document conversion technology.

Sample Workflow

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the document to get a baseline file of all the text surrounding the math.
Create a word document and copy the text into it.
Recreate the math problems and insert them into the appropriate places use a program like MathType.

Document Practice

Download the Practice Document.
Extract the text using an OCR Program.
Enter the text into an MS Word document.
Enter the equations using MathType or another program so that the math is encoded with MathML into the proper locations.