Reflowit

Jessica Pokharel -

Proof of concept released: Jan 2015

Graduated: Sep 2020

Concept:
Read page scan content easily on your phone’s small screen. ReflowIt is a quick proof of concept that reflows the images of the words of scanned pdfs for better reading on a small device.

What we did:

  1. At the New York Public Library Labs' Open Book Hack Day, designed and developed the tool, using the K2PDFOPT open source package to reflow scanned-page pdfs for better reading on a small device. For more information about this hack day and Reflowit, see this blog post.
  2. Refined the concept to release a simple proof of concept that includes nine out of copyright articles from JSTOR.

What we built:

The format of a page-can before running it through Reflowit

How the same article looks after running it through Reflowit

What we learned:

  1. There is strong potential in automatically reflowing page scan content without relying on imperfect OCR.
  2. Users needed to be able to toggle between the original and the reflowed versions of the text.