Turn a multi-page scan into readable text
Runs OCR over a scanned PDF, then writes each page as clean text into a Google Doc you can search, quote and edit.
Apps it connects
Authenticate each one once and the workflow is ready to run.
What it does
The integration steps this workflow runs, in the order it first runs them.
- 1iLovePDFOcr pdf
- 2ExtendParse document
- 3Google DocsAppend text
How it works
Everything the template sets up, and what to fill in before the first run.
A scan is a picture of a page: you cannot search it, quote from it or paste a line out of it. This takes one scanned PDF, recognises the text on it, and writes the result into a Google Doc page by page - headings, paragraphs and tables kept in the order they appear.
Two steps do the work. The scan is first put through OCR in the language you name, which gives it a real text layer; the searchable PDF that comes back is then read into clean, laid-out text, one section per page. Set 'scanLanguage' to the three-letter code for what is on the page - eng, spa, fra, deu, ita, por, nld, rus, ara, jpn, kor, chi_sim - because the wrong language is the usual reason a scan comes back as gibberish.
Everything is appended to the end of your Google Doc under a heading with the file name and the date, and each page is marked with its own page number. Nothing already in the Doc is touched, so one Doc can hold as many scans as you like.
This is a transcript, not a summary: the words written are the words recognised on the page, and a page where nothing could be recognised is counted rather than filled in. If any page is skipped, fails to write, or falls past the 'maxPages' limit, an [INCOMPLETE] note is added at the end saying how many pages were read and how many were written, so a half-read scan can never be mistaken for a whole one.
Fill in 'scanFile' and 'transcriptDocument'. 'scanLanguage' defaults to English and 'maxPages' caps how many pages one run may write.
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