OCR

An easy way to copy text from google books & other text/picture files that don't let you copy & paste.

First, do a screen grab of the text you want, on a mac, that's <4>. Then, upload the picture file that appears on your desktop onto the Free Online OCR. You'll get text as if you had copy-pasted from a PDF. There's another step if you're lazy & have a mac. The clean text app, will convert the text into regular text without all those annoying spaces that you get with PDF's.

Occasionally, even free-ocr won't pick up the text in the picture. If that's the case, convert the picture file to a .pdf (simply change the file extension), & upload it on Comet Docs. That site will also reliably convert PDF files to word documents. Best of all, it's completely free.

As a side note, credit where credit is due. The free-ocr site was originally discovered by Will.