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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a Free and Open Source tool good for this sort of digitizing work? Presumably transforming photos of documents into PDF files with OCR annotations, though I don't see that it has to be PDF. Decent handling of formulae would be a plus.

Also, the website's cookie-consent dark-pattern leaves a bad impression.

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If you are fine with the command line, then nothing beats some combination of Ghostscript, ImageMagick, and PDFtk. OCR is much more complicated but I have used Tesseract when OCR was needed. The results were mixed at best, sometimes being excellent and sometimes being terrible. It largely seems to be a function of the quality of the scan (how flat the text is, how horizontal the lines are, ...), though even seemingly minor deviations sometimes result in unreadable OCR text.

This guide [0] is intended for digitizing books, but it can lead you to some places. If you can get your scans to a PDF (e.g. with a scanner or a smartphone app), you can always try OCRmyPDF [1] to perform the OCR for you.[2] has some tips, but try to look for an older version in Wayback Machine, as I think it has been condenses for the worse.

[0] https://www.natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scann...

[1] https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-notebooks/

I found this gent's articles quite helpful:

http://blog.konradvoelkel.de/2010/01/linux-ocr-and-pdf-probl...

http://www.konradvoelkel.com/2013/03/scan-to-pdfa/

I've written about the tools I use here: http://www.davisr.me/projects/books/

Great write-up, thanks.

I'm finding that ctrl-f isn't working though. When I search for Since Apple it doesn't find the match on page 21. I've tried this on both Firefox and Edge (Chromium version).

In an ideal world, it would also 'clean up' the text, replacing the image with 'live' text in the appropriate typeface, but that's more a wishlist than a real problem.

https://zettel.hackstream.dev

That seems to be a note-taking tool, not a tool for digitising written notes.

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