Re:Show HN: PDFs that are readable by human eyes only
by solardev on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @12:23PM
(#32003197)
It's actually much easier than you think.
You don't need any scripts, just Acrobat itself (or any comparable PDF viewer) can do this. Export the PDF to images, make a new PDF out of the images, scan the text, done.
In general, if it LOOKS like text, SOMETHING can OCR it. That's the whole point of OCR. If you want to try to block OCR, you need something like CAPTCHAs, and that's getting less and less effective every day. In fact many are already more easily solved by computers than humans.
You don't need any scripts, just Acrobat itself (or any comparable PDF viewer) can do this. Export the PDF to images, make a new PDF out of the images, scan the text, done.
Example (took your example and did just that with it, now everything can be copied & pasted as normal text): https://filebin.net/qse2e0oaqkl1hjof/ocred.pdf
In general, if it LOOKS like text, SOMETHING can OCR it. That's the whole point of OCR. If you want to try to block OCR, you need something like CAPTCHAs, and that's getting less and less effective every day. In fact many are already more easily solved by computers than humans.