I can view a pdf image with text using the evince document viewer, however I cannot select the text in the image to copy and paste. How do I copy text from an image in a pdf file?
asked Sep 19, 2014 at 23:18
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PDFs are two types: 1.images being are scanned 2. text being are converted to PDF. You can't convert type #1 to text.– PersianGulfCommented Sep 19, 2014 at 23:49
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2 Answers
You need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to be able to extract text from images. If you Google OCR you'll find plenty of online OCR software that tries to extract text from images. I've personally never used one so hard to say how successful they are. You'll note that some of them take image files as an input in which case you'll have to convert the PDF to an image format (tools for that are available online as well).
If you're more technically inclined, there's a Python library pytesser which may be helpful.
Capture2Text is an open source tool which performs OCR on a screenshot and outputs the result to the clipboard so it almost feels like you're copying the text from the image. This is probably your best bet.
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I apologize, but I went on the Capture2Text website and I was unable to find the linux versions. Am I looking in the wrong website? Commented Sep 20, 2014 at 2:41
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Nothing to apologize about, you're right. I saw open source software and thought if the source is available, you must be able to compile it in Linux. This isn't always the case. Anyway, I found a fairly
detailed poston theUbuntu stackexchangefor the same problem. The problem is that you'll have to build thetesseractOCR engine - instructions can be foundhere. Commented Sep 20, 2014 at 2:58 -
Also take a look at some of the answers to
this question. Commented Sep 20, 2014 at 3:04
Unless you can get some sort of OCR to work, as suggested by Harvinder, you are out of luck. If it's an image in a PDF, it's no different than being an image in a JPEG or PNG or any other image.
Even if you find an OCR package that works for you, you might get very poor results. I've spent more time editing OCR'd PDF's than it would have taken to just re-type the text.
