Scanned PDF Problem Set / Hand-Written Notes

Overview

A scanned PDF is not easy to use with assistive technologies, and this can create problems for students with disabilities. An example of this is when instructors have old documents that have been scanned and saved as PDFs, including handwritten notes or solutions. It's relatively easy to change these PDFs into a Word document and add the math using MathML. Assistive technologies help those with disabilities, and MathML is a language used to present mathematical notation in web pages. 

Programs that can help the process

  • EquatIO Links to an external site. 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.
  • MathPix Links to an external site. 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.

Workflow Overview

  1. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the document to get a baseline file of all the text surrounding the math.
  2. Create a word document and copy the text into it.
  3. Recreate the math problems and insert them into the appropriate places of the document using Word's equations editor or MathType.

Updated 4.22.2025