DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - NOV 2021

OCR'ING PDFS WITH GOOGLE DRIVE

©2021 Donald R. Snow -- This page last updated 2021-11-10. 

These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter.  They are also posted on my Freeware Corner Notes page which is http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html  where the links are active and there may be corrections, updates, and additional information about the topic in other class notes. 
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GOOGLE ACCOUNTS

With your free Gmail account you get a Google account which gives you access to all the Google features for free.  Google Drive can store documents, slideshows, photos, videos, and much more and has many features. You get a fairly large storage space for free and can pay for more, if you want it. This Freeware Corner article is about how to use Google Drive in your Google Account to Optical Character Recognize (OCR) Portable Document Format (pdf) files so they become searchable.  This means adding the text layer to the image layer of the pdf.

GOOGLE DRIVE

You get to Google Drive by going to the Google page, https://www.google.com , and logging into your Google account. Then click the "tic tac toe" icon (3 rows of 3 dots) in the upper right corner of the screen. This opens a menu of all the Google programs (all free) that are included with your Google account, e.g. Google Docs ("Word"), Google Slides ("Powerpoint"), YouTube, Google Translate, Google Drive (online storage), and several others. Google Drive is the icon that looks like a ribbon folder into a triangle. Click on it and you are in Google Drive. In the left panel is a menu with items like "+ New," MyDrive, Print, Shared Drives, Storage, and more. It defaults to MyDrive which is your storage area.

MYDRIVE

In MyDrive you can upload files or folders and edit them.  You see the file and folder names there. To set up a new folder or upload a folder or a file, click on the "+ New" icon. I've found it helps to have folders set up in MyDrive so I can upload files, into them to keep things organized.  You can upload documents, photos, videos, etc., and you can move these around in MyDrive to organize them by drag-and-drop. When uploading files or folders, it may take several minutes, if it is large, and there is a size limit, but that hasn't ever been a problem for me. Uploading files from your computer usually takes longer than downloading files since most Internet Service Providers (the company that connects you to the internet) have much slower upload than download speeds. To check your your download and upload speeds go to the free website https://www.speedtest.net/ . I just checked my internet speeds with this website, Ookla, and my download speed is nearly 30 times faster than my upload speed. So uploading usually takes much longer than downloading, especially if the file or folder is large.  But, once you have files in Google Drive, they are available to you on any device and location where you can get to the internet. Here is a screenshot of my MyDrive so you can see what it looks like. (BTW, the colors are reversed since white-on-black is much easier for me to read with my poor eyesight now.)

https://uvtagg.org
Screenshot of Don's MyDrive

OCR'ING PDFS WITH GOOGLE DRIVE

A pdf is just a picture of a page of text, for example. The picture is the "image layer".  To be searchable the pdf must have the text layer, as well as the image layer. There are programs that will add this text layer to the image layer and this is called Optical Character Recognizing (OCR'ing) the pdf. A free way to add this text layer to a pdf is to upload it to Google Drive, right-click on the file and open it with Google Docs and then save it again.  I usually give the OCR'd file a new name so I can go back to the original, if I need to.  You can download the new file and have a searchable pdf on your computer since it now has the text layer added.  This works fairly fast and does a good job, but I've noticed that it sometimes changes the format of the document and doesn't just add the text layer. You can experiment with using other programs that are in Google My Drive to open it and see if you can get it to keep the same original format, but in any case, you get a searchable pdf.

CONCLUSIONS

Most of us already have a Gmail address, even if we don't use it very often, so we already have a Google Account. That means we can use it to OCR a pdf file by just uploading it to our Google Drive and downloading the OCR'd version. There are some limitations on size, but for many files, it's all we need. This can be accessed anywhere you can get to the internet with Google. Other Freeware Corner articles will deal with other features of Google accounts such as the slideshows, Google Translate, and more.
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