Are you curious about optical character recognition (OCR) software? Interested in learning how OCR software may be able to enhance your research project? Or, maybe you are interested in the ways in which OCR can aid in textual comparisons. This guide aims to help you explore the special features of different OCR software.

Tesseract Setup: MacPorts: MacPorts is an open-source software package management tool that makes it relatively easy for Mac users to compile, install and upgrade open-source software and their dependencies. It's a great first step in installing Tesseract on a Mac. This is not an official build of Tesseract. Direct all issues and comments to opensource@malcolmhardie.com. June 2013 - There is a release up on github (with contributions from others, open source!). November 2010 - Updated for Tesseract 3.0 + minor improvements (This release is based off the older branch, so there. Do not forget to edit “path” environment variable and add tesseract path. For Linux or Mac installation it is installed with few commands. By default, Tesseract expects a page of text when it.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the electronic identification and digital encoding of typed or printed text by means of an optical scanner and specialized software. Using OCR software allows a computer to read static images of text and convert them into editable, searchable data. OCR typically involves three steps: opening and/or scanning a document in the OCR software, recognizing the document in the OCR software, and then saving the OCR-produced document in a format of your choosing.

OCR can be used for a variety of applications. In academic settings, it is oftentimes useful for text and/or data mining projects, as well as textual comparisons. OCR is also an important tool for creating accessible documents, especially PDFs, for blind and visually-impaired persons.

Scanning images with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is immensely helpful to findwhat you're looking for later solely by using the text in the image when searching.OCR is big money, so of course, there's no easy way to do it with a nice UI. Many ofthese apps cost $10, $20, or more, which is unreasonable.

Tesseract is a free, open-source OCR application that many of the paid apps 'borrow',repackage, and sell at a high mark up. Unfortunately, when I say application, I meana command line interface. So, it's not terribly intuitive. But we can simplify it.And in the process, spite Adobe and others for trying to resell something that's soincredibly helpful:

Open the Terminal app, type, and hit enter to install tesseract.

If that didn't work, you don't have Homebrew installed, and you need to run thefollowing command:

this comes from the Homebrew website. It's basically a packagemanager like apt or apt-get that installs ('brews') applications for you.

Now, we need to add an aliased command. We can do that with.

Gets you to script that runs every time you start a bash shell.

On MacOS, you might be using the new, default zsh (Z shell). I recommend youswitch back to bash (since it's superior) by

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1. Clicking Terminal in the upper-left hand corner
2. Click 'Preferences...'
3. Shells open with
4. Enter in the command field /bin/bash. Restart Terminal, and retry the above command.

Now, in the .bash_profile file, append at the bottom of the file

This basically means that every time you run the aliased command convertpdf,bash will run every file in the current directory through tesseract.

Hit Ctrl + X, and hit y and Enter to save the file.

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Restart Terminal. Congratulations, its setup!

Use Example

Now say you took a lot of screenshots of something. Putthem in a folder on your Desktop. Lets say you called this folder on yourDesktop screenshots. Open the Terminal app, and change directory(cd Desktop/screenshots/) to it. Once in that folder, just type convertpdf,and every image will be converted to a PDF.

The Sad Facts

Tesseract is a one-trick pony, so it only converts images. And if you usethat exact command, it will convert those images to PDFs with overlayed,searchable text. A gold standard that not many 'free' OCR converters dofor you online.

What's bad is that it converts every single image to its own individualPDF. And now you have a new problem: You probably want to combine the PDFsinstead of having tens or hundreds of PDFs of the same document.

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Unfortunately, there's no app on the Mac App Store that is:

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1. Free
2. Does NOT contain in-app purchases
3. Combines PDFs
4. Preserves the text overlay layer that makes searchable PDFs actually useful

This seems like a supremely low bar to hit, but life is often disappointing.You might think the 'free' Adobe Acrobat program might be able to combine PDFs.Since, you know, Adobe invented PDFs in 1993,and they're widely used. About 20% of the Panama Papers were PDFs.But unfortunately, the 500 megabyte Adobe Acrobat program will not combine PDFsunless you A) sign into an Adobe account, and B) pay the same cost as a monthly Netflix subscription.

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The native Preview can let you combine PDFs, but it doesn't preserve the text overlaylayer.

There are other hacky solutions like this online, like this gist of a shell script,this repo of a Python script,and others. But I tested the Python script, it doesn't work (even with sometinkering.) The shell script looks over-engineered. The solutoin presentedhere is simple and general enough that it should work across different macOSes,and hopefully into the future.

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I recommend you just organize these many PDFs into a folder, name it smart, andit will be helpful when searching for it, later.