README.md

scan2text

Shiny application to easily extract text from areas in images or scanned pdf files

Installation

Install the following R packages

install.packages("shinydashboard")
install.packages("shiny")
install.packages("shinyFiles")
install.packages("data.table")
install.packages("jsonlite")
install.packages("magick")
install.packages("pdftools")
install.packages("tesseract")
install.packages("digest")

This uses R package pdftools to convert pdf files into png files.

• On Mac OS this requires you to install Ghostscript (e.g. as indicated at http://macappstore.org/ghostscript using Homebrew).
• On Linux this probably means installing Poppler as indicated at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pdftools
• On Windows you are probably safe as is

Usage

Either

• If you downloaded this repository just run shiny::runApp("app.R") to launch the Shiny application
• If you did not download this repository just run shiny::runGitHub("DIGI-VUB/scan2text") to launch the Shiny application
• Or in RStudio open the file app.R and press the > Run App button

• Selected areas from the images or pdf files and the optionally extracted text contained in these areas are saved in de www folder of your current directory

DIGI

By DIGI: Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities: https://digi.research.vub.be