A new method to blog

Here is the original PDF. I made some edits to the content after generating the markdown file

Paper Website is a service that lets you build a website with just pen and paper. I am going to try and replicate the process.

The Plan

The continuity feature on macOS + iOS lets you scan PDFs directly from your iPhone. I want to be able to scan these pages and automatically run an Automator script that takes the PDF and OCRs the text. Then I can further clean the text and convert from markdown.

Challenges

I quickly realised that the OCR software I planned on using could not detect my shitty handwriting accurately. I tried using ABBY Finereader, Prizmo and OCRMyPDF. (Abby Finereader and Prizmo support being automated by Automator).

Now, I could either write neater, or use an external API like Microsoft Azure

Solution

OCR

In the PDFs, all the scans are saved as images on a page. I extract the image and then send it to Azure's API.

Paragraph Breaks

The recognised text had multiple lines breaking in the middle of the sentence, Therefore, I use what is called a pilcrow to specify paragraph breaks. But, rather than trying to draw the normal pilcrow, I just use the HTML entity ¶ which is the pilcrow character.

Where is the code?

I created a GitHub Gist for a sample Python script to take the PDF and print the text

A more complete version with Auomator scripts and an entire publishing pipeline will be available as a GitHub and Gitea repo soon.

* In Part 2, I will discuss some more features *