Sunday, May 16, 2010

Cutting and Pasting from Google Books

Just thought of a nifty way to copy text from Google Books (say, in one needs to quote an extended passage in a paper).

1. Place the desired page in the viewable portion of the screen.
2. (On a Mac) Crtl+Shift+3 for screen capture.
3. Cut and Paste the portion of text using Preview into a new file, Save As 'pdf.'
4. Open PDF with Adobe Acrobat Pro and use the OCR.
5. Voila!

Neeto.

The good is that I am less likely to mistranscribe text. The bad is that the OCR is not perfect, particularly with transliterated Arabic (though it got Mu'tazalite every time!) so I did have to fix the I~;I which was actually an H.

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