Video: Ridiculously Low Tech Way To Extract Text From A PDF And Check OCR

Text On A Page There are two questions that I get asked quite a bit:

How can I tell if a PDF has been OCRed and made searchable?
How can I extract text from a PDF?

There are lots of software products that can do this sort of thing, but the way that I usually do both of these things is pretty low-tech. Watch the video to see how our forefathers did it.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on extracting text from a PDF is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

(Photo by orangeacid)

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About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

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Send Only Non-Sensitive Documents To Evernote • Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog - December 12, 2013 Reply

[…] The second: you need to make sure your list in the Hazel rule is accurate. Otherwise things may go to Evernote that you didn’t intend. The easiest way to do this is to check your OCRed text when building the rule. Here is the way I do it. […]