ABBYY Screenshot Reader and more

Click SHOW MORE for the table of contents for this video!
00:11 Introduction
01:24 ABBYY Screenshot Reader
02:00 Initiating OCR to the Windows Clipboard
02:30 Saving text in Microsoft Notepad
04:08 ABBYY Screenshot Reader again
05:25 Making a scanned PDF searchable
08:57 A look at a text-on-image PDF file
10:50 Copying text from a searchable text-on-image PDF

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Closed Caption:

we're going to take a look at a couple
of useful functions that are included
with a be fine reader 14 I have a
scanned PDF document here a copy of a
patent that I'm going to use as a
reference document in an upcoming
translation let's go ahead and open up
the file and have a look at it
okay I can tell from looking at the
screen that it's a scanned document okay
and when I click on it all of the page
is selected that is also another
indicator that I'm dealing with a
scanned document so I'm not able to
select any of this text there is no text
really it's all just a scanned image so
the first thing I would like to do since
this is only a reference document and
maybe I'm only interested in the
abstract the abstract is available here
with an English translation this is a
German patent you're with the number 57
in parentheses you see the abstract in
English and then underneath it the
German abstract so I'm going to use a
little program called the Abbe
screenshot reader it's included with a
be fine reader 14 and when I select that
program I'll tell it to capture an area
okay I'm going to click on the button on
the right to capture a screenshot and
then I'm going to move my cursor up and
select the part of the scanned document
that has the English abstract that I'm
interested in and after I've selected
that underneath the red box where the
selection is there's a little word that
appears captured and when I move the
cursor over that the pointer changes and
I will click on that and then it just
sits here and it copies the text to the
clipboard let's have a look at that I'm
going to launch notepad and simply paste
in the text there it is okay and I'll go
ahead and save add a file give it a name
you
okay now actually what I just did a
notepad is a mistake because when you
save a text file in notepad when you
have the word wrap turned on under
formatting what it does is insert a
bunch of line breaks so really what I
want to do is save it in this form okay
with no line breaks I have problems with
that occasionally and the other thing I
want to do when I save text files I
usually try to save them in utf-8 format
now in notepad when you go to save at
the bottom of the save dialog there is a
little drop-down box by the word
encoding and here you can choose
different types of text I tend not to
choose ANSI because it doesn't support a
lot of special characters that you might
find in German or Portuguese for example
so I choose one of the Unicode versions
typically utf-8 because that's
compatible with the other software that
I use so now I'm going to go ahead save
that document this way okay and we'll
close it and now I will launch the ABI
screenshot reader again click the button
to capture
select the area that contains the German
abstract click the capture button
[Music]
and paste it into a text file
and save it once again saving it has a
utf-8 text file
okay now what we just did did not
require launching the usual full OCR
program with all of its additional
functions and slowing ourselves down so
this is a quick easy way to convert
small bits of text that one might find
in a graphic somewhere
okay now the second useful function that
one might find with a be fine leader 14
and also with earlier versions and also
for that matter with other OCR programs
it's available from the context menu so
we're going to right click on the icon
for that PDF document and here in my
context menu I have a function that says
convert with a be fine reader 14 and I
want to convert to a searchable PDF
document and what that will do is take
my scanned PDF and make it a text on
image PDF PDF a format I believe and
make that available for searching
without
changing any of the formatting a lot of
people will convert reference documents
like this to a Microsoft Word file but
very often that messes up the formatting
and reduces the reference value so we
want to leave all of that intact okay so
I'm going to tell it to convert this to
a searchable PDF document
okay and I'm going to change the name
here and I have the word searchable so I
can distinguish it from the original
document in this save as dialog I can
specify the OCR language in this case
it's German it usually comes up with
German as the default because most of
the OCR work I do is from German but in
case I'm scanning in English or
Portuguese document I will change the
OCR language here and then we'll click
Save
okay it'll take a couple of minutes to
do the conversion or just sit here and
watch the dialogue and see how long this
thing takes it's converting twenty nine
scanned pages so that is quite a lot of
text okay sometimes on a page it might
encounter a lot of words or formatting
or it questions whether the language
setting is correct in this case I think
everything is correct so I'm just going
to leave things as they are for now
you
okay but I could be making a note to
myself to have a look at page 14 or page
26 which are indicated here in the
warning message the other nice thing
about this function for converting
scanned documents to searchable PDFs is
if you have multiple document pages on a
single scanned page this function is
usually very effective at breaking up
that image with multiple pages on it and
Carol processing is finished here and
making separate pages in the searchable
OCR document that is very helpful it
also will rotate the pages if that's
necessary so that they have the proper
reading orientation in the searchable
document you create okay
and it opens up the document in a be
fine reader 14 okay I'm really not
interested in looking at it in this
environment but if you wanted to do
something with it here you could we'll
go ahead and close that and here in my
working folder I see a copy of the new
searchable PDF document that we created
now let's go ahead and open that up
briefly
all right well it looks pretty much like
the other PDF document did but let's see
how well it does for searches so we'll
go ahead and look for a word I'll look
for the German word for claim
okay and it's sort of a fuzzy search
here all right here I
see selection ok
continue to search using control G to
find the next ok and it's finding that
text embedded in any of the words that
it may run across ok so that looks
pretty good we'll do another search here
for the German word for phenol resin
that's fit all the hearts okay I see it
here on the page so I know I'm gonna be
able to find that all right and you see
here the first instance is selected and
then the next instance that is seen on
the page is also selected so we'll go
ahead and scroll through the document
and see all of the various occurrences
of that particular word ok so now what
I've done is I've taken a dead image PDF
and converted it into a searchable
document which retains all of the
formatting ok all of the graphics and
everything else that I might want to
look at for reference and this is a much
better approach than converting to
Microsoft Word document or some other
formatting if your intention is to use
this for a reference document but if you
say but wait a minute wait a minute I
want to I want to translate some part of
this maybe maybe I want this text here
for example this abstract text that I
converted before with a screenshot
reader maybe I want to take that and do
something with it somewhere else well
now this scanned image is a searchable
image there is live or selectable text
behind that image as you can see I've
been able to select the text here and I
can also copy that text for example here
using the function from the context menu
and I can launch a text program and
simply paste that text into the document
so you can still take out parts of the
text that you might want to cite in a
document if you're for example an
attorney and need to do some citations
from the original text in the scanned
PDF if you convert it to a searchable
PDF you can select whatever parts of
that text that you want to use for other
purposes copy them and then paste them
into a text editor of your choice or
paste it into a messy messaging
application or something like that these
are all useful functions which are
included with the a be fine reader 14
license you don't pay anything extra you
don't have to install any additional
software they're just there available
for you and for many of the uses that
you might have for OCR maybe one of
these functions can perform that
conversion a little bit more efficiently
without having to launch the very
resource heavy heavy fine reader
application every time
you