All Email Messages in Gmail Have a Permanent Web Address

All Email Messages in Gmail Have a Permanent Web Address

Do you know that it is possible to bookmark individual email messages of Gmail just like you would bookmark any regular web page.

This could be a handy alternative to search in Gmail (for accessing important emails quickly) or may be useful in situations where you don’t want to create another tag in Gmail just to remember a couple of important email messages.

You can bookmark Gmail message links in your web browser or save them as private bookmarks in delicious or even add them to your Read It Later list.

open any Gmail thread in your browser and notice the address bar as it gets updated with a unique URL. That’s the permanent address of your email message and it will stay the same as long as you don’t delete the message from your Gmail mailbox.

There aren’t any security issue because you can only access the email bookmarks if you are logged into your Google Apps or Gmail account.

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Extract Text from Images & Scanned PDF Manuals Online

Extract Text from Images & Scanned PDF Manuals Online

If you are on a budget, the built-in OCR engine of Google Search is almost a perfect option for converting scanned PDFs to text – just put all your scanned PDF images onto a public website and wait for Google spiders to convert them into editable digital text.

Obviously there are two drawbacks associated with the original idea. The PDF conversion process is not real time and second, you need access to a public web server where you can upload the PDF images so that Google bots can find them.

If you aren’t willing to wait that long and need to perform instant OCR without downloading any of the software tools, try OCR Terminal – it’s an online Optical Character Recognition service where you can upload scanned images, multi-page PDF documents or even screenshots and convert them into searchable text documents.

The conversion results, as you can noticed in the screenshot above, are pretty accurate and it also preserves the document formatting and layout. You may download the extracted text as RTF or a Word Document. The output is also available as a PDF image though I didn’t find that option very useful.

OCR Terminal is a free service but you are only allowed to convert up to 30 scanned pages in a day and allows for text extraction only from English language documents. They are developing a desktop client that will allow users to convert scanned PDFs or TIFF images and get them back as formatted Word files without the web browser

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