Hacker News Reader

From what I can tell, there is no reason you can't just run the PDF through ABBYY FineReader again and get the exact same OCR you got the first time, so I think "irreversible" is a bit over-the-top.

Is it as easy as CMD+Z? No. Is it data you can never get back? Also no.

View on HN

In theory that is probably true – in my actual scenario I can't run them through ABBYY again because of the limitations of the bundled version. It only accepts PDFs coming from the scanner software, so running these through ABBYY again would give me an error message. I'd have to buy the full version to be able to try out that workaround.

On a totally not entirely unrelated note, I have found ExifTool[0] to be quite useful for many tasks. Especially in combination with a bash alias or simple Automator action, to be used in the services menu, or as a droplet or folder action. [0]https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html

That's exactly what I'm planning to explore as a workaround to remove the blank pages until ABBYY and/or Apple sort this out. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com