3 ms·
They are flattened: The FBI prints out files, redacts them, and then scans them back in. A number of federal agencies do this, really making it a pain to search
by morisy 15y ago
They are flattened: The FBI prints out files, redacts them, and then scans them back in. A number of federal agencies do this, really making it a pain to search through documents.
- jrockway 15y agoYou can upload the PDF to Google Docs, which will OCR it and make the document searchable. This particular PDF, however, is rejected because it's more than 2MB :(
- morisy 15y agoWe're looking to build quality OCR into MuckRock so every document gets it, but it's surprisingly either a) technically difficult or b) financially expensive, choose one.
- knewter 15y ago1) http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ 2) grep
- morisy 15y agoThat's really cool, thanks. But I don't think it includes OCR. The best FOSS OCR out there is Tesseract, which we use through DocumentCloud, but it still leaves a lot to be desired compared to commercial solutions.
- loumf 15y agoWhat do you consider expensive? Transym is really good and not too expensive (disclosure: they are a partner of my company -- but I am endorsing them on that basis)
- morisy 15y ago£60.00 doesn't sound bad. We'd need it to fit into our automated workflow and be able to handle hundreds of pages at a time, and occasionally 1k+ page documents, and stuff from Nuance we'd looked at would have cost $4k or more a year, plus charge per page which is a deal killer. This might be a good fit ... thanks!
- Raesan 15y agoI OCRd it using Acrobat: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/980684/Jobs.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/980684/Jobs.pdf Probably not perfect, but better than nothing.
- sliverstorm 15y agoI can't help but suspect they do this very much on purpose.
- jrockway 15y agoYes. Accidentally leaking information makes it harder for the FBI to gather information in the future, so they ensure that they are very careful when disclosing information. In this case, it makes the information harder to search, but that's why we pay journalists to read the released documents and summarize them for us.