2009 September | Nerdlets

Get Real Text out of your Scanned Documents

Books, Computing, Research Tools, Software 2 Responses »

Sep 292009

: Image via CrunchBase

OCR is the technology used to turn an image of text into plain (editable, search-able) text. If you’re like me (i.e., a nerd) you probably have a pile of scanned journal articles and books and such meticulously sorted on your hard drive (PDFs for example). You can read them and print them, but you can’t search them or edit them. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could?

Well, there are a number of free options on the web, but they all have their problems. Google has some of the best OCR technology out there–they recently acquired CAPTCHA to make it even better–and they have apparently been rolling this out into Google Docs. The Google Docs version is not as wonderful as you might like, but it works on high-res documents. Read about how to turn your images into text here.

Update: I was not able to get this to work with PDFs, surprisingly. The web-app only accepts PNG, JPEG, or GIF images right now. That is unfortunate, and I assume will be “corrected” in the future. Has anyone tried this on an image yet?

Zotero Updates Word Processor Plugins

Books, Computing, Research Tools 10 Responses »

Sep 172009

If you are using the 2.0 Beta version of Zotero then I have good news. Zotero has recently updated their plugins for word processor integration. I have had a couple of problems with the OpenOffice plugin, so I am excited to see that work continues.

It appears that the update is fairly significant. One major change is that the both the Microsoft Word and the OpenOffice plugins are installed as browser components. Previously you had to add them as Word Processor macros, which can be messy and is difficult to upgrade when there are changes. By contrast, the new plugins are always up-to-date because Firefox does the checking for you, and all the messy installation is handled by the plugin itself, rather than the old manual process. In short: if you can install a Firefox plugin, you can install Zotero’s Word Processor integration.

There are a number of back-end changes to the plugins (ie., Java), with the result that everything seems to run a lot more smoothly. Two major problems I had with the previous plugins—errors in footnotes with multiple Zotero fields, and lack of support for adding citations within a table—are now fixed, which makes me an even happier camper than I was before.

How to get it

You will need the latest Beta of Zotero for the new plugins to work. To install the plugins follow the instructions on this page (be sure to install the 2.0 plugins, about half-way down, rather than 1.0 plugins). Once you restart your browser Zotero will do the rest.

If you are not already familiar with Zotero check out my description and guide.

Note for Linux users: if you haven’t already, you will need to install Sun’s version of Java (“sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin” in a terminal).