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…
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.
Simple: pirate adobe acrobat and ocr them yourself.
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…
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
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.
