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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5953 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the best way to copy long passages from a physical book?

Typing takes forever, so that's out. I've tried Googling a digital copy of the book, but a lot of times the books I read aren't scanned or are in the form of PDFs without copiable text. I usually usethe Google Lens function of my Camera app to grab text using OCR, but it's only about 95% accurate, meaning I often have to go back through and correct a lot of erroneous letters and punctuation. Is there a smarter way to do this?

You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.

This is awesome, thank you!

Good OCR (something like recent versions of Tesseract, see here for a good frontend, though using the cli on PDF files works great) and going through the output to find the inevitable mistakes is the fastest method in my experience. Typing it all yourself is less annoying but takes more time and isn't any less error prone.

You can also pay someone to do it if your time is worth too much.

using the CLI on PDF files

That might actually help quite a bit. Thanks, I'll check this out.

Depends on why you are doing it. If it is for reference and retention, you'd probably be best off taking a picture and then writing your own summary and thoughts than just typing it all out.

Type faster.

Been trying since middle school, I'm just a shitty typist.

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