not being able to ctrl-F a textbook or have click-to-chapter links sure makes studying harder these days… and any scanning software worth it’s salt will at least do the bare minimum OCR automatically…
I much prefer doing ocr by myself if really needed, than getting an half assed “book” full of typos and broken tables just because someone did an automated OCR but didn’t have the 5-6 hours required to manually edit to make it decent
Already be thankful that someone took the time to flip page by page in their scanner manually and upload it somewhere
Look, it’s all about authorial intent - if the author had wanted their book to be easy to reference or accessible to people who use screen readers, they would have published a DRM free PDF in the first place. Gotta respect the artist’s vision.
…and sometimes the artist turns out to be an idiot :D
Or the professor who’s profiting off requiring the latest edition of their own book each year.
You can do it yourself:
Bitch you can’t ctrl-F or click to chapter in an actual book either.
Wait until OP hears about the Index at the back of the book.
I know, that’s my point! PDF’s are inherently superior BECAUSE you can usually CTRL-F them.
Simple: pirate adobe acrobat and ocr them yourself.
Or OCRMyPDF https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
I might just do that and reupload the OCR’d copy. I already have 3 or 4 books that I’ve saved out to cut the binding off of and scan in- gonna need OCR for that too.
In my free time, of course. University waits for no student…
OCR’ing a book before uploading saves so much hours on the user end of things. I wish it were done more so I don’t have to leave my computer running overnight to batch OCR stuff.
By the time you finished making this snarky meme, you could’ve set up a program to OCR a book yourself.
‘A’ yes, but the more scan pix you get, the annoyter you get
Sites like Anna’s library should permit users to flag books without OCR and permit users to submit OCR version of the books.
Very impressive! That’s a bummer that you need Chrome to make it happen though :/
It will still work on PDFs loaded in Chrome to be fair though.
There are a bunch of online tools that are free and let you upload a PDF to have it go through OCR.
Just Google “Free PDF OCR” and click through all the ads to upload, then give them a temporary email address to get a download link to the finished product.
Hot tip: There are free temporary email address sites too, if you need one to avoid getting on their ad lists.
List of free temorary email solutions.
https://www.guerrillamail.com/
https://addy.io/ - this one is slightly different
and about a billion similar ones.
If you have a jpg or png file, you can upload it to Google drive, then right click and open in Google docs, and it will OCR the text for you.
OCR?
Optical Character Recognition. Essentially, software that “reads” an image and pulls text out of it.
