insect VS OCRmyPDF

Apparently this replaces https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

You might like https://insect.sh/ ;)

For the record I use insect.

https://github.com/sharkdp/insect seems to be somewhat similar, but it's mostly for physical units. However, it's the only opensource one that is embeddable.

Insect: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

It is a bit slow but has decent features, including some physical units support.

I set up Tilda (or another Guake equivalent; I tried a bunch of them and can’t remember on which I settled in the end) to run it automatically when a terminal is opened, when pressing Scroll Lock. It’s quite neat: when I need to do a quick calculation, I just hit Scroll Lock, which spawns a drop down terminal with the focus; then type whatever I want to calculate; then control-D to dismiss the drop down terminal and I am back in whatever I was doing without moving either hand off the keyboard.

I do more or less the same thing on my Mac with Alfred.

I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:

Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)

Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/

Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)

Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)

Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)

insect.sh goes up to about 109 × 1015.

Try https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF - it uses Tesseract behind the scenes and it absolutely brilliant.

I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

If by "like a photocopy" you mean the file contains images of text rather than text, the MacOS viewer presumably does OCR on the images. I don't know if there's a Linux document viewer with that capability built-in, but a quick search turned up the standalone tool OCRmyPDF.

For anyone interested I solved the problem by first ocr files through the free and open source software ocrmypdf avaible here

ocrmypdf is nice for stuff like that.

Use imagemagick to convert them to PDF and ocrmypdf to straighten and OCR. See this explanation.

Fair enough, maybe this might work for you, it should seperate the text from image anyway and if you have Adobe acrobat it should be able delete the background too with the edit function. It may already be able to do that if you haven't tried it