Some musings arising from a search for PDF translation services

A new $25 Translator integrates Google Translate into Adobe InDesign, Adobe’s PDF editing DTP software. An API key with Google Translate is needed, though.

Another recent third-party option for InDesign editing of PDFs is Translate from Id-Extras, which appears to be promisingly low-cost. It appears from my related searches that, rather surprisingly, that there’s no such thing as an Official Adobe PDF Translator plugin. You might have thought Adobe would have been onto that years ago, and made a small fortune for their shareholders off it. Nor has Microsoft slotted Bing Translator into Microsoft Publisher.

Spotting these made me wonder what was similar and available free for LibreOffice, the free Office suite. I find that “working in 2020” is the free PageTranslate. Install of plugin/extensions in LibreOffice is not manual, but done via Tools | Extension Manager. Once installed, this shows up under Tools | Page Translate…

Supported is inline ‘translate and replace’ of English to German, Spanish, French. It works fine in doing this, hooking into Google Translate and allowing both full document translation and translation of “selected and highlighted” text. No API key or other log-on is needed for Google Translate, though you can switch it over to other services that do require keys or logins or suchlike. Its provider settings are found under Options | Language…

Obviously then, if one could rig up a reliable way to convert a PDF to Word, and then translate in place (‘inline’), that would be a useful thing to have on a desktop PC. Especially for those that have slow Internet uplinks, and for whom sending a 80Mb PDF up to the Cloud for translation might take an hour. But I’ve yet to find a reliable freeware for the Windows desktop that offers “PDF to Word, and retain layout 100%”. LibreOffice’s Draw component claims to import PDF, but while it may be adequate for the layout of a plain academic journal it makes an utter hash of the layouts of magazines. This is the sort of layout I’m talking about…

You can see how fiddly it might be to individually copy-paste each block of text to Google Translate, and how easy it would then be to lose track of what bit came from which part of the page. The ideal here would be that some as-yet-unmade software would identify each block of text and its co-ordinates on the page, the text in each would be copied (by OCR if needed) and auto-translated, each text block would be erased then filled with its translated text.

So, PDF to Word… the best genuine conversion freeware I’ve found and tested so far is Nemo PDF to Word 4.0, which is a good try — but does not capture the layouts and font styling 100% on my test PDFs. Maybe 80%, and the remaining messiness may be largely due to font substitution. Which is a problem on my side, not on Nemo’s — my PCs simply lacks the snazzy fonts that the magazine designers were using for their PDF.

There are of course Cloud services and three or four bits of paid software that claim to auto-translate a PDF while retaining 100% layout fidelity, but they all appear to be Cloudy and limited unless you pay. Curiously, none of the ones I’ve looked at offer a few before-and-after “sample conversion” PDFs, by which to judge their wares. Various names include SYSTRAN PDF Translator ($279), Babylon Pro (subscription), Multilizer ($40?) and couple of others. Multilizer does have what is effectively a demo, though. These are at the consumer and small-business level, and I find they are not to be likened to the fiendishly complex pro-translator software suites such as MemoQ and Trados Studio, the latter being designed for translation professionals who have accounts with high-end machine-translation services to assist in their laborious daily work.

One interesting bit of desktop Windows freeware found was Lingoes, but judging by my tests it no longer works in terms of calling in Google Translate. Google tightened up on access a few years back, and it appears to have left several such software makers high and dry. I’d be interested to know if there are still ways to get Lingoes working in 2020, as it otherwise seems be a free alternative to the paid Babylon Pro. Possibly API keys are needed, even for Google Translate?

Finally, I also see that Foxit PDF has just introduced a “Translate PDFs into other languages” free service for those signed up to its Foxit Cloud (also free). No screenshots are included on the blog post, though, so I assume the translation probably “appears” in a sidebar rather than replacing the original text inline in the way that Project Naptha does it.

The free and still-working Project Naptha is exemplary in showing how inline “OCR, translate, erase to white space, paste in translation” should be done. But it can only do English to other languages. Give it a block of text in French, German or Italian and it’s kaput. If someone out there wants to be a major philanthropist to the world, getting Project Naptha able to work with text other than English would be a fine project to fund. The secret to that appears to be getting the free Tesseract OCR engine to work with text other than English.

Partial fixes for Google News changes

The Google News page layout has updated, here in the UK. Here’s the latest on how to tame it…

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1. Hide thumbnails and icons:

Add these lines to the foot of your uBlock Origin block list, save, reload…

These lines should hide your thumbnails and ID icon on Google News…

! Always autohide Google News thumbnails and ID icons - but retain source name
google.*##*.sYpfDb
google.*##*.QyR1Ze

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2. Fix the colours and font size.

Headline text colour and font size is controlled via CSS thus…

/*** Fixes Google news headline colour and font size ***/
.nDgy9d.JheGif
{
color: #3d69ac!important;
font-size: 15px !important;
}

/*** Fixes Google news source-name colour and font size ***/
.WF4CUc.XTjFC
{
color: #4c7d48!important;
font-size: 13px !important;
}

/*** Highlights date on Google news result ***/
.WG9SHc
{
color: #e3732a!important;
font-size: 11px !important;
}

This can be added to the bottom of anything you have controlling the CSS for Google, e.g. the Stylus browser addon and a UserStyle.

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3.

Block search suggestions as you type your search query.

! Block Search Suggestions on Google News
google.*##li.gsfs.sbsb_c

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PDF Index Generator 2.9

PDF Index Generator 2.9 is a new February 2020 release of the best sub-$100 back-of-the-book automatic indexing software. It very usefully adds automatic footnote indexing, and…

The Windows edition of the program now comes with Java embedded inside it, so you don’t have to worry about installing the right Java edition to run the program.

How to get pretty buttons on your Google CSE results

How to get pretty buttons on the bottom of your Google CSE results.

1. You want this…

Instead of this…

Ok, so not that much prettier, but bigger. You can work on the styling once you know how to do the basics.

2. First set button and letter/edge colours to match your site/page. You do that here in the CSE Dashboard…

Save.

3. Then add this CSS code into your HTML page header, or your blog theme’s ‘custom CSS’ panel.

4. Save, refresh the page, test. Tell your users they don’t have to squint any more.

VLC Playlist Edit Maker 1.0

I’ve made an Excel spreadsheet that automatically does the calculations required for making a VLC player ‘playlist edit’ of an .MP3 file. By inputting timings and then copying out the columns in light blue, one gets a nearly-made playlist that uses the required ‘elapsed seconds’ format and will only play specific sections of the target media file. See my earlier post for a full discussion on this unique feature of VLC.

Download: timecode_to_seconds_for_vlc_playlist_edit.xls

I’ve assumed here that you have an 80 minute podcast you want to listen to repeatedly. You want to cut the first eight minutes of intro, and also cut two later sections and the final outro. Theoretically it should also work for the ‘virtual editing’ of a video file. No hefty video-editing workstation required!

Useful extra tip: On the keyboard, Ctrl + T gets you the current time on the VLC playback, in the format: 00H:38m:27s. This can be easily copied to the clipboard, and (with a little trimming) into my spreadsheet. So far as I can tell it can’t be made into a paste-friendlier: 00:38:27.

How to ‘edit’ an audio file using only timecodes and playlist

I’m amazed that there’s no easy way to skip across precise multiple sections of an audio file, when playing back in a laptop/desktop audio player. And to then have one’s choices of sections ‘stick’.

For example, I have a 56 minute audio track, downloaded as an .MP3. I am going to listen to this repeatedly, on a loop, and on playback I wish to always skip minutes 0:00 to 9:30, and then 15:30 to 26:00. The player should save my choices and then ‘always skip these sections, whenever I play this file’ locally.

As far as I can see the only options for doing this on a Windows desktop are…

a) actual editing of the audio file in a good audio editor such as Audacity or similar. But an MP3 can take an age to load and then to save out, when dealing with a 50-60 minute track. At a half-hour to laboriously load and process each one, that’s a whole day wasted if you have an album or long audiobook to to process. And if you’re not savvy about export settings, you can also compromise audio quality on export. The clumsy may also risk overwriting the original file.

b) it can be done via a hand-coded workaround that makes a VLC Player playlist. Not ideal, but it seems to be the best current solution and VLC is safe and well supported. It’s relatively quick and wholly non-destructive of the original files.

The simplest form of use for this is…

1. First preview your audio file and make a note of the various ‘in’ and ‘out’ points, giving you a list of just the segments you want played. For example…

PLAY 09:31 – 15:29
PLAY 26:01 – 56:30

2. Then open Windows Notepad and copy the starter template…

#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=1550
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time= 2611
Acquired Ears.mp3

#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=2890
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=3803
Acquired Ears.mp3

The numbers here are the time in seconds elapsed since the start of the audio file. start-time and stop-time should be self-explanatory.

3. Now use the Time Code to Seconds Web page to translate your own noted times to seconds, seconds being the only measure that VLC Player can handle. Most crude online converters only deal in pure seconds. The one linked above can cope with proper audio-player values, such as 26:33. There appears to be no way to do this inside VLC.* A local desktop option for this is the simple Windows freeware Time Converter 1.0. It gives you milliseconds and to get seconds from that you just lop off three zeros…

Update: I made a better solution, a VLC Playlist Edit Maker 1.0 Excel spreadsheet.

Obviously you also paste in your own file name(s). Blank spaces in the filename don’t phase VLC player.

As you can see you can have multiple sections of the file listed for playback. It appears that each selection/section/segment must follow after the last such, though it might be possible to skip back and forth across the file. It also appears you can also skip between audio files and generally create quite a complex playback mix. Try such things and see. But for the purposes of this tutorial, all that’s needed is a stepped sequence of playback across one file.

4. Once done, you save it out as a .txt file. Then rename this file so it’s a .m3u playlist. The playlist must then be located in the same folder as the audio file(s).

VLC can loop the playback of such a playlist. Video subtitles are said to play nicely with the ‘playlist edited’ playback.

This saved .m3u playlist only seems to work as intended in VLC Player, not in AIMP or other players that also know about .m3u playlists.

Apparently this also works for video, thus potentially easily enabling the lightweight distribution of ‘edited’ or ‘abridged’ versions of video/audio files, along with the actual files themselves. This relieves a potential editor of the need to wrestle with actual editing and re-encoding of the raw file, in a video editor or audio editor. Which, as anyone who has tried it knows, is a pain is the arts.

Now… if only VLC could also fix its broken “Continue playback” feature, which has never worked for me on a desktop across multiple versions — despite all the right switches being set in Preferences | Interface. The only solution I know of is to specifically call the target playlist from the Windows shortcut, by editing it thus…

“C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” C:\Users\Music\playlist.m3u

Then, clicking on the resulting shortcut to launch VLC also automatically launches the target playlist. If it’s a playlist configured as above, it will play as it should and loop as normal. It still won’t automatically start at the point you left off listening when you closed VLC, but it’s better than nothing. AIMP, in contrast, handles such things perfectly and with no problem or setup at all.

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Anyway, one can see the uses of such special playlists, for instance for reducing fiddliness when using video in the classroom. Or for offering just the ‘edited highlights’ of a long three-hour podcast without actually going to the trouble of editing it in Audacity. Or for creating a quick ‘cleaned’ version of media for viewing with young children. There may be some paid ‘subscriber value’ in offering such ‘playist edits’ to Patreon patrons etc, or as a ‘mailing-list special feature’.

Indeed, there’s potential for a desktop freeware / Web site combo which makes the above process as easy as possible, and then allows the social sharing of ‘playlist edit’ .m3u files, in much the same way as subtitles are already shared. Perhaps the ability to upload the user’s final edit would be contingent on summarising what was in the excluded bits, and having labelled the file correctly (e.g. ‘this section of the music appears to feature a yodelling camel’, and ‘music edit, to skip unwanted singing’).

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* VLC Player also has the addons ‘Jump to Time’ (doesn’t appear to show seconds in any useful way for this purpose), and ‘Time 3.2’ (impenetrable interface, and even when finally wrestled into supposedly working it shows no seconds count anywhere in the UI). There appears to be no other ways of showing elapsed seconds / milliseconds inside VLC 3 via a plugin, though “Crtl + T” will grab it during playback. One final option is the VLC 4.0.0 alpha (most people are on the 3.0.1 stable version). This has SMPTE timestamps, SMPTE being industry-standard timecodes apparently including milliseconds. But the 4.0 .MSI and .EXE refused to install for me, and the .ZIP install just gave a black UI. You may have better luck with it in future.

How to auto-correct curved book pages in 2020

What you found pictured by an eBay seller:

What you want from it:

Ah, if only there were software that can do that… automatically. As a first step, what software can auto-correct curved book pages, of the sort one might be allowed to hastily photograph from a rare book page in a library, or perhaps in the form of a seller’s preview picture on eBay? Of course, I imagine there are now abundant mobile-phone solutions for naughty page-grabbers in book-stores, but what about for scholars on desktop Windows?

It used to be that Snapster 2.0, aka Snapster ICE, could do this via manually placing control-points along the curvature of the pages edges. But that software is now utterly unavailable except as an old 15 day trial which can no longer be unlocked. There’s also an equally finickerty free script for the free Paint.NET, which involves manually laying down two curves — and which I could not get to work at all. Tests show that neither the fine £45 DxO Viewpoint (mostly for architectural photographers) nor its free equivalent ShiftN can do exactly this (though if you have the page fairly straight, they’ll help get everything on it exactly straight). Nor can Photoshop do such auto-correct, rather amazingly, or at least there’s no mention of the capability or any tutorial in how to find and use the relevant tools.

But… there is a solution, and it’s free and relatively easy. You can have it done automatically by a special edition of the Windows freeware called Scan Tailor. No, not the normal/current Scan Tailor, but rather Scan Tailor Experimental 2015, which was a ‘special edition’ produced as a farewell present just before the original maker of Scan Tailor left the project for paid work. His experimental version includes automatic de-curving of book pages, of the sort found in some dedicated software that ships with scanners.

It seems best to first place your target picture(s) in a separate folder and then load up and output one a time, unless they all have the same orientation and distortion. Scan Tailor is obviously meant to run in batch across a lot of nearly-identical book pages. But it works fine and quickly on single images in Windows 8, and even auto-saves the results as a .TIF file.

Automatic isn’t totally perfect, as you can see in the lower-right. It’s a bit ‘off’ there. But even accepting automatic, the results are quite usable…

Automatic does need some edge-contrast to work with. A low-light eBay photo of a book page against a beige carpet will prevent auto from working, and you’ll have to place control-points manually.

As for the colourisation… still not quite automatic as yet, but there are tools that will help you halfway. Then you need to break out the desat and colourising brushes. Good up-rezing can also be done now, but with a fuzzed antique picture like this at 800px the results are not going to be worth having. What can be had from the eBay picture is good enough for a local history website or blog.

If your boss needs current supported software for photographing books on a tight budget, then the $33 Booksorber appears to do much the same thing, with automatic thumb/finger removal.

New editor UI for free WordPress users

The new fancy editor UI has landed for free WordPress users. Yes, they’ve given it a radical makeover, again. Thankfully I haven’t even needed to look at it, nor the one it replaces, as the trusty old editor is still chugging away — if you know how to get to it. To use the very old ‘original’ one, you simply install the vital UserScript WordPress.com edit post redirects. Every time you press ‘Write’ to start a new post, you go to the lightweight interface you’re familiar with.

It is a little too lightweight in just one respect. You will not get a button to add a ‘center’ code on the old editor UI, which you do on the fancy one. This can be replaced by a right-click browser addon such as ‘Paste email‘ which you set up to paste…

No need to add the end p tag. Here there are also Italics tags. I’m assuming you want a centred picture-title, in italics to clearly distinguish it from the body text.

Note that you will need to switch to the new UI in order to successfully download a .ZIP backup of your blog. You can go through the motions on the old UI, but you’ll not get the .ZIP file.

How to print a list of what’s in a Windows folder

How to print a list of what’s in a Windows folder. No need to wrestle with the Command prompt or Outlook. It can be done with most Web browsers…

1. Open a Web browser (not Internet Explorer). Highlight your folder, and drag it to the browser’s Address Bar (not onto the page itself).

2. The folder structure will then display as a Web page. Copy and paste to the clipboard.

3. If, for some reason, you can copy everything except the actual file-names, then simply print the page to a PDF. Copy-paste them from the PDF.

There is also a Windows freeware option called DirPrintOK. This looks fiendishly complex when you open it up. But it’s actually just working much like any normal Windows Explorer replacement, except it has a handy export option up in its top left corner…

This can save the list of a folder/directory’s files out to a .CSV file, as well as to plain text. Thus, this is the option to choose when you have a huge folder, and you want to separate the file-names from the datestamps and file-size information.

WordPress2Doc – a free ebook converter for free WordPress.com blogs

Hurrah, there is freeware to get a free WordPress site to Word as a .DOCX file, and thence to an ebook. Only the one, and hardly known to search-engines, but it’s for Windows and it works. WordPress2Doc comes from Germany and was last updated by the author, Raffael Herrmann, in December 2017. The source code for WordPress2Doc is on Github.

It has some nice features…

* Select only certain posts from your exported .XML feed.

* There’s a post preview, over in a side-panel.

* Images are called and embedded (so long as the source WordPress blog is public, presumably).

* Images are correctly sized for the page (if you just copy-paste straight into Word from your blog post, they’re not).

* The blog’s pages are also exported and can be selected, as well as the posts.

* You can also save straight to a PDF, as well as Word.

* Can save each post as named Word .DOCX file.

There’s a PDF Help guide in the download, but there’s also a good Help video at YouTube. But it’s very simple and easy to use. Once you have your Word file, it’s then relatively easy to save to an ebook.

If you’re still using the old WordPress UI, then you may want my guide to how to export your site as an .XML export. Because using the old interface won’t get you a viable export. Incidentally, it seems WordPress are now chunking the .XML export of large blogs. I had two .XMLs in the backup .ZIP, for my medium-sized test blog.

The only bother for an ebook maker will be re-ordering into themed sections or chapters without a whole lot of tedious select-copy-paste, and WordPress2Doc can’t help even partly with that as it lacks tag-support and list re-ordering before saving the .DOCX file. The best way to tackle the problem is probably to export in themed batches, one per intended chapter or section, though that would entail making ten passes of what might be 4,000 posts. Which is not ideal. But it looks to me like WordPress2Doc works best with smaller blogs anyway.

But note that WordPress can export posts to .XML by category, at least. Also, WordPress2Doc can save multiple selected posts as ‘one file per-post’. You could then sort into chapter folders by dragging and dropping, and then use a Word joiner to join them together.

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Update: I don’t like the over-compression of images with this method, and some of the text formatting is also lost. I’m coming to the conclusion that one would ideally tag posts with the category “ebook-ch1”, “ebook-ch2” etc in the blog itself, then view that category, then copy-paste the page(s) into Libre Office Writer. Unlike Word, this retains formatting, including italics and indented quotes, and also retains picture quality. In almost all cases the pictures are scaled to the page width, which they’re not when using Word to do the same thing. This all assumes, however, that you still have a live blog with its CSS, and not just the .XML export files.