Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Adds OCR To PDF and Images

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the typing-is-for-suckers dept.

Kilrah_il writes "Now you have the option to OCR every PDF and image you upload to Google Docs. 'When you upload files to Google Docs, you'll notice a new option that tells Google to convert the text from PDF and image files to Google Docs documents. ... I've tried to convert an excerpt from the book Rework and the result wasn't great. About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.'"

2 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Captcha correction? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could google provide some sort of opt-in service where our PDFs (one word at a time) could appear as a captcha. More or less what reCaptcha does, except with something a bit newer.

  2. Re:lolwut? by erikdalen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Didn't fail at all on a PDF with typed text for me. Did you actually try it?

    I bet they don't actually use OCR on a PDF with typed text as they can just extract it from the PDF, they probably use that on images inside PDFs though.

    --
    Erik Dalén