pawngrabber wrote on 12/09/17 at 13:56:19:
I know this isn't a complete solution, but I use chessify android app to OCR all of the puzzles and then save as PGNs. I slice and dice them where I have PGNs for each book, one PGN for all 'tactics' chapters from all books, and one PGN for all 'endgame' chapters from all books.
A tangent: I wasn't aware of Chessify and had a look at the features listed on their website (
http://www.chessify.me/). The section on 3D recognition raised an eyebrow:
Quote:The real chess board scanner is a result of our latest research in a field of Artificial Intelligence. Powerful 3D recognition software was created using state-of-art technologies of Deep Learning. It provides users ability to scan real chess board and get the digitised board on their phone. Using our advanced tool during chess tournaments will make possible to follow the game and livestream analysis simultaneously. Being first in it’s field 3D chess board scanner is going to be one of the strongest and useful tools in the world!
It's difficult to read this as anything other than a blatant invitation to cheating. Why else would you want to go and scan a current game position on a board
during chess tournaments and compare it with "livestream analysis"? In fact, merely by bringing a smartphone into the tournament hall, and certainly by keeping it turned on, you're likely in breach of the FIDE rules.
So how about taking pictures of the board while a game is in progress, and OCR-ing positions while keeping a livestream running? Have these people slept through every single cheating scandal in the past decade?!
I'm sure it's otherwise a great product; thinking of getting it myself. But they need to rewrite that section on 3D recognition, and maybe consider dropping this functionality altogether. Though I can see some uses for it in training, i.e. to quickly store positions of variations I've calculated (stepping stones, end points of variations, etc.) for future reference.