Converting physical chess books to pgn/chessbase files

[shiv]

I am trying to convert physical chess books to pgn or chessbase format. Manually doing this takes a lot of time.

I have played with scanning the pages and then using gOCR and the tesseract OCR engine. I probably have to write a bunch to scripts to automate the conversion and in addition need to import the text and moves from many pages as a sequence of games. Has anyone tried this before or are there other tools which are useful in this process?

[Cubeman]

Sorry but I don't know of a tool that can do this, but do know of a site that has many books already converted.
http://www.gambitchess.com/semi/dbbooks.htm
I wonder if there are a combination of exixting tools that would acomplish this.As I spent many hours converting a book with 1000 combination positions and dreamed of some better way.Could an optical scanning device be developed to recognise the board positions and return a FEN string.

[Nimzovik]

Why not just chew your big toe off? It would be less painful. Thoroughly scan the net for the games you want. They are there I wager.

[shiv]

Heard of the dbbooks site before. However, it seems improved compared to before. Nevertheless, it does not help me for 2 reasons:
1. They only provide pgn devoid of annotations.
2. The book has to be purchased from Gambit.

For converting diagrams to FEN, I came across a site that claims to be able to do this by the name of http://fairychess.com. The site is down now, but you can get the tool from http://web.archive.org/web/200711230417 ... sScan.html

[shiv]

Why not just chew your big toe off? It would be less painful. Thoroughly scan the net for the games you want. They are there I wager.

The games are likely available on the net, but not the annotations/variations that are given in the books.