ocrsoftware-recommendation
How can I extract text from images?
I am not talking about scanned files, but garden variety images, such as when you take a high-def picture of a blackboard at class, and it is nicely handwritten; or when you photograph a page from a recipe book and want the recipe in text format.
Any free and open software for that?
I tried tesseract, and the results were awful.
Take a look at this: Remove text information from a PDF?
Pasted here for your convenience:
Openoffice
Install the PDF Import Extension from Oracle into your Extension Manager for OpenOffice and you will be able to open and edit your PDF files inside of OpenOffice Draw. Which will create all the elements (text, lines, drawings, etc.) and you will be able to remove those that you don't wish. A screenshot is here:
Gimp
If you prefer to handle your pdf pages as layers and edit'em as images, then you can right click the PDF file and choose "Open with GIMP Image Editor", the "Import from PDF" dialog will show after opening gimp and will allow you to choose which pages you wish to edit with several options as shown in the next screenshot.
After which you will also be able to edit those pages as shown in this screenshot:
Good luck!
There is no perfect way to do this yet. The best existing way is to install Xournal from the software center and open PDF files with it. It allows you to annotate them and then export the whole thing as a new PDF.
Since you are basically marking up a new layer on top of the original PDF, you have to line up everything as you type, and manually position all your notes. For a simple document it's pretty easy to do. It's not very practical for longer documents, though.
Best Answer
The act of extracting text from images is called
OCRand Ubuntu has a wiki page dedicated to OCR. From that page:Available OCR tools
The Ubuntu Universe repositories contain the following OCR tools:
The Ubuntu multiverse respositories also contain:
Some packages are outdated, but unofficial fresh ones can be found in Alex_P PPA (PPA adding code: ppa:alex-p/notesalexp). If you never used a PPA check how to add software from a PPA.
edit: As shown in comment Clara OCR exists too but it got stuk at Hardy and their website has 2009 as last updated.