Get Real Text out of your Scanned Documents

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 [...]

Even More PDF Tools

As a follow-up to my previous post, here is an excellent review of some more great PDF conversion and manipulation tools.
Also I am happy to report that I have had good success converting PDF images to plain text with OCR terminal, so give it a try!

Search your PDFs with OCR

Paper isn’t going away, of course, but having all your documents on such an antiquated medium is often less than ideal. There is at least one major disadvantage to paper: searching is much more difficult. That’s just one of the reasons PDFs are so popular! Anybody can open a PDF file for free, search it [...]

Amazed by Google Books

Digitalization is the way of the future, and with the recent deal between authors and Google books, that future may in fact be bright for all parties.
In the course of my dissertation work I often have to track down primary sources, and when those sources are particularly rare it becomes difficult. Or it used to [...]