TextLayer OCR
Turn scanned PDFs searchable while preserving forms
What it does
TextLayer OCR repairs fonts/toUnicode in PDFs, preserves AcroForm forms and widgets, and runs OCR so text is searchable/selectable — available via UI and API.
Does a similar job
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- PTPDFs that are readable by human eyes only2022 · humaneyesonly.com · ▲216
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't…
- YCYou can now cut and paste from scanned documents in Firefox2024 · ▲33
I just realized you can now open a PDF document in Firefox and select text directly from scanned images embedded in the document (so basically transparently reliable doing OCR). It is also surprisingly reliable, only sometimes mistaking a "oh" for a "zero" in a long string of numbers. I neither know when this was introduced nor who added this feature, but from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, you have made my daily life a lot easier. I also haven't really explored the limits of the feature and under what conditions it starts failing, but: in my daily workflow so far,…
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