I downloaded a tamil foodbook. I´m trying to translate some parts online to have the recipes in english.
When I copy and paste a text passage and paste it into Pages or Textedit the text is converted strangely:
This is an example:
is converted into
ª›£.÷ì‚è‹
anybody ??
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)
You'll need to use an optical character recognition (OCR) application to recognize the PDF image (or perhaps an exported .png/.tiff/.jpg/etc. of the PDF) as text, then copy the text to your application of choice. There are online sites that will help. Here's one that can handle Tamil:
http://www.i2ocr.com/free-online-tamil-ocr
And the results: your original image on the right, the OCR-converted text on the left.
Hi mns576,
thanks for the idea!
That´s a good method to do it! Even though there are some mistakes but it somehow works ; )
Here´s an other free ocr website which is even faster and don´t ask for a captcha every time: www.newocr.com
Thanks again for helping : )
PDF is not really a text file. It isn't designed to copy anything out of it like that. If you can get the data in any other format, use that. For PDF, the most important factor is luck.
And if I can´t ?!
It´s a book I bought online and I want to translate some recipes for my personal use.
Isn´t there a way to export or something?
That tip is worthy of a bookmark. Thanks!
How to properly copy tamil text from a .pdf
