Ever had to read through pages upon pages of printed material to find just a few small pieces of information? In school I often found myself having to read through entire chapters of dry useless information just to pick up a few morsels of pertinent text to to answer a question or verify some facts. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search any printed text, find some key phrase/word and read surrounding text to understand the needed context? There are several free OCR document services available and I found them extremely useful when doing research or homework. Here’s how:
[step 1] Grab your printed text pages and scan them. The result can be a bunch of images or a large PDF whatever your scanner gives you will work.
[step 2] Go to OCR Terminal. Log into Google Documents (you’ll need a free Google account) and click Upload->Files…
[step 3] Be sure to check the box stating “Convert text from PDF and image files to Google documents.”
[step 4] When files have been uploaded, they will be searchable Google documents even if the source was a a scanned image or PDF made of page scans.
That’s it.
Comments
2 responses to “Turn scans/images into searchable documents for free”
Awesome! I have tons of scanned science papers in pdf form. None of them are searchable. This is a huge time saver, now I can convert them all to searchable pdf and my staff can effortlessly search an entire repository of these files to find what they’re looking for.
Psst students, you know those eReserve documents your professor keeps assigning? OCR Terminal will let you turn them into searchable documents…just FYI.