Modelon Solutions

Last week I had a simple problem – extract the text from a scanned pdf. The PDF was more like a container for the scanner’s image that it was a container for text that i could cut and paste.

The solution – use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to “read” the text off of the images into a Word document. Then I could fix the few errors and off I go.

Quite a big problem to solve, i could download free software that act like viruses and change my browser settings, i could upload the pdf to a totally random web site and have no idea what they do with my document. Not very appealing.

I asked a colleague, because when Google fails that is what i do. He mentioned that if i upload the pdf to Google Drive and try to open it with Google Docs, that should fix it.

I tried it and sure enough, it worked. My first triumph using Google Docs. A very neat trick indeed.