Luke's Ubuntu and Linux Hacks

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) Background Rarely am I jealous of "anything Windows," but one of those is the Windows Power Tool that takes a screenshot of an image file and allows you to OCR any text in the image. But while I covet an exact replica for Linux use, I have settled on NormCap as my favorite alternative. I tried some other Linux alternatives, but I won't waste time and space on details of why I did not like them.  My only beef with NormCap is that the Flathub version simply will not work on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I am far from being a programmer, but my guess is that it has something to do with a clash between t...

  gscan2pdf Okay, so that's a really long title for a blog post, but sometimes you must use many words to explain what it really is that you are doing, a lesson learned by spending a lot of time on the mostly worthless forums where people have very little ability to form a subject line that has anything to do with their issue.  At any rate, some background. I love downloading public-domain (mostly) books and documents, but often they are scanned as image files. As I am a writer and want to use quotes from the pdf, it is much easier if I convert the picture pdf to a text pdf so I can copy and paste, rather than re-typing the  quoted material.  There are lots of ways to go about this conversion task, but often they require buying conversion software or paying to play in the cloud. I hate spending money on work stuff, so here's my simple, quick solution.  Install gscan2pdf. In Ubuntu, you can do that from the Ubuntu Software Centre or the Gnome Software Center. If ...

Be sure to check out our related post, "Convert PDF-image Files to Text." Click the "convert" label on this post . Undoubtedly, the Pay to Play programs often are the quickest, easiest and most efficient way to convert pdf files to text files such as MS Word or LibreOffice Writer. But we're not playing in a Windows or Mac environment, and we don't like to pay for stuff. So here are a few other ways to convert pdf files without paying for a program and without resorting to using Wine, dual-booting or any of that other Windows-centric stuff we detest. Converting an OCR or "Readable" pdf File to Text That means that the pdf file is not an image file. How can you tell if a pdf file is a pdf-text or a pdf-image file? Simple. If you can use your cursor to highlight words or sentences in the pdf file--especially if you can invoke the Copy-Paste function--it is most likely a pdf-text file. If not, it is probably a pdf-image file. PDF-Text Files Once I have...

I googled "Open Microsoft Publisher Files in Linux." You should not make the same mistake. After poring over dozens of suggestions, speculations and "solutions" (most of which were not really solutions), here's what we concluded. Use Scribus or LibreOffice Draw to view or open .pub files.  Use Scribus if you need to open a publisher file and edit or create a new Publisher-compatible file. Use either program if all you want to do is view the file, and use either program if you need to convert the .pub file to .pdf (use File, Export in each of the programs). As with virtually all of our recommendations, we don't get into the Wine or dual-boot-to-Window discussions as a solution.