Hey DEV community! 👋
Ever been handed a technical spec, an academic paper, or legacy documentation in a language you don't speak? Copy-pasting paragraph by paragraph into a browser tab is the ultimate productivity killer.
As developers, we need to optimize this workflow. Before you throw tools at the problem, you need to parse your input data. You must determine if your PDF has a text layer (selectable text) or if it's a rasterized image (a scanned document).
If your cursor can highlight individual strings of text, you're good to go. If it highlights the whole page as a single block, you need OCR.
Here is the modern stack for translating PDFs based on your file type.
