Converting PDFs with (selectable) text into "normal" images for OCR purposes via /r/pdf

Converting PDFs with (selectable) text into “normal” images for OCR purposes

Dear redditors,

I’m writing a doctoral thesis at the moment and for research purposes (and better workflow) I need to convert a scan of an old German book into (searchable text). I tried quite a few things but nothing worked and now I am getting really frustrated:

I downloaded the pdf from archive.org (https://archive.org/details/diebedeutungdesw00erdm)

I want/need to convert this pdf-file into text. Unfortunately the book is written in “Fraktur” (old German calligraphic hand) and the built-in pdf (Adobe?) OCR software/program/plugin/whatever-it’s-called does not at all recognize the text in any usable way.

I know recognizing “Fraktur” is pretty hard but I normally use FreeOCR (http://www.paperfile.net/) which does great work with Fraktur (and is much better than the OCR-software archive.org uses. I tried this with scanned texts several times before and I got very good results)

But now I am unable to make FreeOCR work with the linked (and downloaded) pdf. Somehow the text in the pdf is “selectable” but copying it into a txt-document gives gibberish as result. However, converting the pdf online to image files (and also opening it with FreeOCR) only gives/shows me the “blanc” pages without text.

Therefore I’m looking for any way to get FreeOCR work with the pdf. Is there any way to “convert” the “selectable” text into “image”-text again?

(Google isn’t helpfull with this because obviously I’m lacking the technical term for this “selectable text” in pdfs and searching fo untechnical terms only gives me links to OCR-Software)

If you guys could help me with this, this would be really great. Thanks a lot in advance!

Submitted January 17, 2019 at 02:08AM by WordPad_GER
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/pdf/comments/agx4qj/converting_pdfs_with_selectable_text_into_normal/?utm_source=ifttt

from Medical Release Form https://medicalreleaseform.tumblr.com/post/182088459591
via Medical release form
from Tumblr https://jeemiahmelville.tumblr.com/post/182088577262