Extract text from image or pdf

How can you effectively extract text from a pdf or an image ? commmonly called OCR (optical character recognition). I found 2 extremly powerfull tools based on the open source engine Tesseract (Official website).

I am using windows and can be both used on this OS. One permit to convert scanned pdf to searchable pdf (as well as copiable). The other permit to get a screenshot from an area of your screen, convert it to text and store it in your clipboard.

• Ocrmypdf
  • you need to use Ubuntu on windows more info here
  • update your apt: sudo apt-get update
  • install it: sudo apt install ocrmypdf
  • check the documentation for the cmds
    • here an easy example for frencg pdf: ocrmypdf -l fra "input.pdf" "output.pdf"
  • To install new languages (for Ubuntu)
    • check which exists: apt-cache search tesseract-ocr
    • install what you need: sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-fra
• normcap
  • easy to install, just use the exe

Have a try :)