Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Online OCR is a brilliant online tool that recognizes text in images or PDFs.  In seconds it converts the text into a word processor document that allows you to edit and format the text.  Magic!  If you've ever had a PDF or a hard copy of a document that you wanted to edit, Online OCR is your new best friend.   OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.   Online OCR allows you to upload an image file or a PDF.  You then decide what kind of output file you want to generate.  Typically one would choose Microsoft Word.  Even if you don't have Microsoft Word on your machine, you can easily upload a Word file to Google Drive, which converts it to an editable Google Doc.   Online OCR even works with other languages.  If you are uploading an image or PDF that contains a foreign language, you can instruct it to maintain that language when converting to text.  (In the video below, I misinterpreted the language feature and...

CocoMaterial is a website that offers thousands of copyright-free, hand-drawn illustrations.  If you are looking to place an image into a document or slide, CocoMaterial is a one-stop shop that provides high-quality clipart illustrations that are simple and easy on the eye.  I hate sifting through millions of blurry or overly complicated images in Google when all I want is a simple graphic that looks good on my document or presentation.  If you agree that simple is better, then CocoMaterial is a great place to look for images. You can customize the images in CocoMaterial before downloading them.  You can change the stroke (outline) color, and you can fill the image with a chosen color.  By default the images are black-and-white illustrations with black outlines.   When you download an image, CocoMaterial provides you with a compressed zip file that contains both a PNG file as well as an SVG file.  You will probably never use the SVG file; thes...