Have a PDF document that you would like to extract all the text out of? What about image files of a scanned document that you want to convert into editable text? These are some of the most common issues I’ve seen at the workplace when working with files.
In this article, I’ll talk about several different ways you can go about trying to extract text from a PDF or from an image. Your extraction results will vary depending on the type and quality of the text in the PDF or image. Also, your results will vary depending on the tool you use, so it’s best to try out as many of the options below as possible to get the best results.
Extract Text from Image or PDF
Read Aloud is a program that will read text aloud. It has two main interfaces, one for entering Web addresses that the program will browse to and read the text on aloud, and another tab labeled.
Jul 05, 2017 2. Voice Dream Reader (iOS, Android) Voice Dream Reader shows the text of the article being read, and highlights each word as it is spoken. Since the app was originally developed as an assistive.
The only limitation is that the max size for the PDF file is 10 MB. That’s a bit small; so if you have a bigger file, try some of the other methods below. Choose your file and then click the Send file button. The results are normally very fast and you should see a preview of the text when you click on the Text tab.
Nov 07, 2016 Text-to-Speech has been a very helpful Mac feature for me as well. Another related item in this sphere that has helped with my productivity has been CK’s Text-to-Speech to MP3. CK’s software is simple–highlight/copy some text, click the application, and let it work in the background until you hear the alert, “done” which means it has. One of the easiest ways to experiment with the Mac 'text to speech' capability is to open the Mac Safari web browser, highlight some text, and tell the system to read the text to you, using the built in Mac text to speech system. To hear your Mac 'speak' some text to you, just follow these steps: Open a web page in the Safari web browser.
The simplest and quickest way to start is to try an online PDF text extractor service. These are normally free and can give you exactly what you are looking for without having to install anything on your computer. Here are two that I have used with very good to excellent results:
ExtractPDF
ExtractPDF is a free tool to grab images, text and fonts out of a PDF file. The only limitation is that the max size for the PDF file is 10 MB. That’s a bit small; so if you have a bigger file, try some of the other methods below. Choose your file and then click the Send file button. The results are normally very fast and you should see a preview of the text when you click on the Text tab.
It is also a nice added benefit that it extracts images out of the PDF file too, just in case you need those! Overall, the online tool works great, but I have run into a couple of PDF docs that give me funny output. The text is extracted just fine, but for some reason it’ll have a line break after each word! Not a huge problem for a short PDF file, but certainly an issue for files with lots of text. If that happens to you, try the next tool.
Online OCR
Online OCR usually tended to work for the documents that didn’t convert properly with ExtractPDF, so it’s a good idea to try both services to see which ones gives you better output. Online OCR also has some nicer features that can prove handy for anyone with a large PDF file that only needs to convert text on a few pages rather than the whole document.
The first thing you want to do is go ahead and create a free account. It’s a bit annoying, but if you don’t create the free account, it will only partially convert your PDF rather than the entire document. Also, instead of only being able to upload only a 5 MB document, you can upload up to 100MB per file with an account.
First, choose a language and then pick the type of output formats you would like for the converted file. You have a couple of options and you can choose more than one if you like. Under Multipage document, you can select Page numbers and then choose only the pages that you want to convert. Then you select the file and click Convert!
After conversion, you’ll be brought to the Documents section (if you’re logged in) where you can see how many available free pages you have left and links to download your converted files. It seems like you only have 25 pages for free a day, so if you need more than that, you’ll have to either wait a bit or buy more pages.
Online OCR did an excellent job of converting my PDFs because it was able to maintain the actual layout of the text. In my test, I took a Word doc that used bullets, different font sizes, etc and converted it to a PDF. Then I used Online OCR to convert it back to Word format and it was about 95% the same as the original. That’s pretty impressive for me.
Plus, if you are looking to convert an image to text, then Online OCR can do that just as easily as extracting text from PDF files.
Free Online OCR
Since were talking about image to text OCR, let me mention another good website that works really well on images. Free Online OCR was very good and very accurate when extracting text from my test images. I took a couple of photos from my iPhone of pages from books, pamphlets, etc and I was surprised at how well it was able to convert the text.
Choose your file and then click the Upload button. On the next screen, there are a couple of options and a preview of the image. You can crop it if you don’t want to OCR the whole thing. Then just click the OCR button and your converted text will appear below the image preview. It also doesn’t have any limitations, which is really nice.
In addition to the online services, there are two freeware PDF converters I want to mention in case you need software running locally on your computer to perform the conversions. With online services, you’ll always need an Internet connection and that may not be possible for everyone. However, I noticed that the quality of the conversions from the freeware programs were significantly worse than those of the websites.
A-PDF Text Extractor
A-PDF Text Extractor is freeware that does an fairly good job of extracting text from PDF files. Once you download it and install it, click the Open button to choose your PDF file. Then click Extract text to start the process.
It’ll ask you a location to store the text output file and then it will begin extracting. You can also click on the Option button, which lets you choose only certain pages to extract and the extraction type. The second option is interesting because it extracts the text in different layouts and it’s worth trying all three to see which ones gives you the best output.
Mac Text Messages
PDF2Text Pilot
PDF2Text Pilot does an ok job of extracting text. It doesn’t have any options; you just add files or folders, convert and hope for the best. It worked well on some PDFs, but for the majority of them, there were numerous issues.
Just click Add Files and then click Convert. Once the conversion is complete, click on Browse to open the file. You mileage will vary using this program so don’t expect much.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that if you are in a corporate environment or can get your hands on a copy of Adobe Acrobat from work, then you can really get much better results. Acrobat is obviously not free, but it has options to convert PDF to Word, Excel and HTML format. It also does the best job of maintaining the structure of the original document and converting complicated text.
June 2017: a key component for these instructions is no longer actively maintained, so these instructions are no longer valid for Modern Mac configurations.
I listen to podcasts. I watch videos. I watch podcasts of different languages. But more than anything I read and write. I practice languages. That’s just how I roll. And sometimes, my ramblings bring me as far as understanding English meaning of some specific kikuyu translation texts.
Frequently I want to save an audio snippet or video clip for future reference. Sure I could save the source media file, if I had unlimited disk space. But what I usually do is keep a link to the original source and text synopsis of the snippet. That both saves on storage and makes future searches for that particular item simpler.
If you’re like me, you really want the original text more than a synopsis. It take s a bit of extra effort, but I have a nice solution that uses only a Mac and open source software. Read below for instructions on converting an MP3 audio file to a text document.
The Basics of Configuring Your Mac to Transcribe .MP3 Audio
Here’s what you need:
The original media (.mp3 file, for example)
Soundflower. Soundflower is an application that creates a virtual audio channel and directs audio input and output to physical or virtual devices.
Audacity. Audacity is a free application for recording and editing sounds.
TextEdit.app. TextEdit is the default text editor/word processor that is included in Mac OS X.
Follow the instructions on the developer websites to get all of the software installed and working on your system. Once you have the software installed, the next step is to configure your Mac to use Soundflower for dictation.
Open System Preferences and click on “Dictation & Speech”
Select the Dictation tab
Select “Soundflower (2ch)” as the dictation input source
Click Dictation to “On”
Tick the “Use Enhanced Dictation” box
Your Mac is ready for dictation. When dictation is turned on in TextEdit (or a another word processing app), your Mac will transcribe sound from the Soundflower input source.
Mac Software That Reads Text To You
Getting Your Audio and Text Files Ready
Speak To Text Mac
Next, you need to queue up the audio file in Audacity and direct output to Soundflower. For those who are new to Audacity, this will be the trickiest step. But relax, you don’t need to learn much about Audacity beyond deciding what section of sound to play and how to select the audio output from the default speakers to Soundflower.
Launch Audacity
Import your audio file into audacity (File–> Import, or simply drag the file into the center of the Audacity screen.)
Click the play button to give it a listen, then click stop once your confident you have the right sound clip/transcription area.
Choose Audacity –> Preferences –> Devices. Under playback, choose “Soundflower (2ch)” to switch the output from the onboard speakers to Soundflower. Click “OK”
With Audacity and your sound file queued up, its time to turn your attention to TextEdit.
Launch TextEdit
Create a “New Document”
You may want to add some meta data to the document, such as the podcast name, episode #, publish date and URL, to go along with the key transcript.
Position the cursor in the file where you want the transcript to appear.
And … Action!
It’s time to start audio playback and dictation transcription. Here both sequence and timing are important:
In Audacity, move the scrubber start location 10-15 seconds before the key transcription area.
Press “Play.” The scrubber and meters will start moving, though you won’t hear any sound. The audio signal is going to Soundflower instead of to the speakers.
Put focus on Text edit and position the cursor where you want the transcription to begin.
Select Edit –> Start Dictation. (or use the hot key combination, Fn Fn). A microphone icon with a “Done” button will appear to the left of your document.
Text will start appearing in the document. It will likely lag by about 3-5 seconds.
After approximately 30 seconds press the “done” button. Transcription will continue until complete.
This is the fun part: watch as transcription happens in real time right in the document window. Look Ma, no hands!
And now you have the original text (and most likely a few errors) as text to save. In the future you can easily search and retrieve the information.
An Excellent Alternative: Google Docs Voice Typing
While the solution above works great for offline work, one alternative with a lot of promise is Google Docs. The Voice Typing feature work much like the dictation service in Mac OS. It has the crowdsourcing advantages and privacy disadvantages of other Google products. If you’re OK with that, I found Voice Typing to do an very good job with accuracy and it can go longer that Mac OS dictation.
Software That Reads Text Aloud
To use Google Voice Typing, follow all of the steps above with Soundflower, Dictation preferences and configuring Audacity. Instead of using TextEdit, you’ll want to start the Chrome browser and create a Google Doc. Once you are in document, Select Tools –> Voice typing
The user interface and process of starting and stopping transcription is the same as with TextEdit.
Dictation and Transcription Limitations
This process sets you well on you way to the goal of a high fidelity audio transcription. But it will be short of perfect. Here’s what you can do to go from good to perfect:
Text From Mac To Android
Understand that Mac OS dictation transcription works for a maximum of 30 seconds at a time. If you need longer, you may want to use an alternate technology such as Dragon.
Audio playback needs to start before dictation/transcription begins in TextEdit. TextEdit needs to be in focus for dictation to work. If you set the Audacity scrubber a few seconds ahead of target snippet, you’ll be fine.
Transcription cannot intuit punctuation. You’ll need to add that after the fact.
If you have multiple speakers or a noisy background, you may need to complete one additional step of creating a pristine audio file to work from. This can be done by listening to the sound through headphones and speaking the text into an audio recorder. Use the recording of your voice to drive the transcription.