- download the pdf
- use pdfimages (part of xpdf) to extract the images: pdfimages newdealoldrome.pdf newdeal
- use convert (part of imagemagick) to convert them to tiff: for i in newdeal-*.p?m;do convert $i ${i%%.p?m}.tif;done
- make sure the extension is tif and not tiff otherwise the next step won’t work (either use the .tif extension in the previous step or rename the files separately)
- use tesseract to OCR the images: for i in newdeal-*.tif;do tesseract $i ${i%%.tif};done
- merge the text files: cat newdeal-*txt > newdeal.txt

Now you have a big text file and that should be viewable with anything. Tried it with two of the documents mentioned in the story. OCR quality is surprisingly good, make sure you have the english dictionary for tesseract.

I can only hope that Mises continues to grow, and that more and more people continue to take the “red pill” because of it. This would be the greatest gift to our posterity.

Let’s give complete freedom 300 years and see what happens.

It’s only fair.

In fact, this post has renewed my urge to type of a book known as “Rational Money” I found at a book sale. It might not have an Austrian bent, but it is still a nicely built book from 1898.

Please accept my most sincere thanks for the work you at the Mises Institute perform.

I became interested in Austrian political economy after following Congressman Paul’s presidential campaign. I have since read several books by von Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, De Soto, Hulsmann, etc. I have generally purchased the books that I read, but I have also printed some downloadable pdfs. Most importantly, I have printed chapters of particular books and given them to friends who ask questions about particular issues. In short, the Mises Institute has become an invaluable tool in my own education and in my efforts to educate other truth-seekers.

A final point: Advocates of strong idea restrictions (also called “intellectual property”) claim that publishing would be impossible without state-enforced monopoly licenses. My own interactions with the Mises Institute tend to undermine that conclusion: I have purchased hundreds of dollars of books from the Mises Institute, and I have given several copies of Hulsmann’s The Ethics of Money Production to friends and family as gifts. I may have never become familiar enough with the ideas to purchase those books were it not for the free exposure of the downloadable pdfs. More people become familiar with the ideas of leading thinkers in the Austrian tradition thanks to the downloadable pdfs. The Mises Institute will benefit financially from such a development, of course. More importantly, however, individual members of the Mises Institute will live in a more free and prosperous society.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.