Fujifilm Makes Photographed Text More Visible on Smartphones

GT Layout on the left, normal panning across wide documents on right

Here’s a fun service from the folks at Fujifilm (TYO:4901) that helps you more easily view text that appears in your photos. It’s called GT-Layout, and according to Diginfo News, you can try it out as a feature in the GT Document Lite for Dropbox app for Android.

What’s remarkable here is that it doesn’t take the conventional approach of using OCR to convert images of text into actual text. But rather it sort of ‘cuts out’ each character (the demo below uses Japanese text) and subjects those mini pictures to line line wraps when the reader zooms. Thankfully, pictures that might accompany a sample of text are ignored.

In the demo video below, the example of photographing images on a whiteboard is given. And I can’t help but ponder the applications of something like this for taking notes in business meetings or even during school classes.

I’m looking forward to testing out GT Document Lite (which claims to display documents ‘faithfully without distortion’), because I was never a fan of PDF reading, and I hope they’ve made it a little bit easier thanks to this sort of technology.