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feat: add --mode strip to remove the OCR text layer without rasterizing

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Adds a processing mode that removes the invisible (render mode 3) OCR text
layer in place. Unlike `--ocr-engine none --force-ocr`, it does not
rasterize the page, so images and visible content are preserved unchanged
and the output is smaller rather than larger. Options that require
rasterization or OCR (--deskew, --clean, --sidecar, etc.) are rejected.

Only invisible text is removed; text drawn as visible glyphs under an
opaque image (some OCR engines, and OCRmyPDF v2.2 and earlier) cannot be
removed this way, as documented.

Closes #1435.
This commit is contained in:
James R. Barlow
2026-06-11 12:34:03 -07:00
parent 8a8d515933
commit 0d4c3bcdcf
8 changed files with 152 additions and 11 deletions
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docs/cookbook.md
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@@ -249,19 +249,34 @@ case. Use `--tesseract-non-ocr-timeout` to control the timeout for
non-OCR operations, if needed.
:::
### Remove all text or OCR from my PDF
### Remove the OCR text layer from my PDF
This is getting ridiculous, but OCRmyPDF can complete strip all textual
information from a PDF and reconstruct it as a \"bag of images\" PDF.
To remove the invisible OCR text layer while keeping the original pages
exactly as they are -- no rasterizing, no change to images or visible
content, and a smaller output file -- use `--mode strip`:
```bash
ocrmypdf --mode strip input.pdf output.pdf
```
Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you have a PDF where OCR failed to
produce useful results and you simply want to get rid of it.
`--mode strip` removes only text drawn as *invisible* (PDF text render
mode 3), which is how OCRmyPDF and most OCR tools add a searchable layer
over a scanned page. Some OCR products -- and OCRmyPDF v2.2 and earlier --
instead draw *visible* text and paint an opaque image on top of it. That
text is part of the visible page, so `--mode strip` cannot remove it
without altering the page's appearance.
To strip *all* text, including such visible text, rasterize the whole page
into a \"bag of images\" PDF instead (this rebuilds every page as an image,
so the file usually grows and vector content is lost):
```bash
ocrmypdf --ocr-engine none --force-ocr input.pdf output.pdf
```
Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you have a PDF where OCR fails to
produce useful results, and just want to get rid of all OCR information.
This command also removes OCR generated by third party tools.
### Optimize images without performing OCR
You can also optimize all images without performing any OCR: