I'm a student and I often have to read a lot of material for my major. I have a mild learning disability that affects my visual processing, so I've been using NotebookLM to help generate audio summaries and condensed notes for better understanding of harder texts. However, many of these texts are old and only available as low-quality scanned PDFs which NotebookLM can't read. I'm looking for recommendations on effective tools that can extract text from these poor quality scans. Free options would be great, but I'm open to paid subscriptions too!
5 Answers
One Note has worked pretty well for me in the past when extracting text from images, so that might be worth a try!
You might want to check out some OCR tools. They can be helpful, but if the images are really poor quality, you might not get the best results.
I've had fantastic luck with the "Text Extractor" feature in Microsoft PowerToys. It's similar to a screen-snip tool, where you can select a rectangle around the text, and it copies the text to your clipboard. Just note that it only works for languages that have the OCR pack installed, so check the documentation for that. PowerToys has a bunch of other handy tools as well, so it's a must-have for me on new PCs. My wife also loves it and she's not super tech-savvy!
Check out "Tesseract OCR" and try anything that pops up in that search. It's highly recommended!
I took a peek and will definitely give it a try. Thank you!
Google Docs has a feature that converts images to text, so that's an option as well.
If the image quality is too bad, no tool will be able to do anything with them without human help.