OCRmyPDF
========

OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched

To get the script usage, call: sh ./OCRmyPDF.sh -h

Main features
--------

- Generates a searchable PDF/A file from a PDF file containing only images
- Places OCRed text accurately below the image to ease copy / paste
- Keeps the exact resolution of the original embedded images
    - or if requested oversample the images before OCRing so as to get better results 
- If requested deskews and / or clean the image before performing OCR
- Validates the generated file against the PDF/A specification using jhove
- Provides debug mode to enable easy verification of the OCR results
- Processes several pages in parallel if more than one CPU core is available

Motivation
----------

I searched the web for a free command line tool to OCR PDF files on linux/unix:
I found many, but none of them were really satisfying.
- Either they produced PDF files with misplaced text under the image (making copy/paste impossible)
- Or they did not display correctly some escaped html characters located in the hocr file produced by the OCR engine
- Or they changed the resolution of the embedded images
- Or they generated PDF file having a ridiculous big size
- Or they crashed when trying to OCR some of my PDF files
- Or they did not produce valid PDF files (even though they were readable with my current PDF reader) 
- On top of that none of them produced PDF/A files (format dedicated for long time storage / archiving)

... so I decided to develop my own tool (using various existing scripts as an inspiration)

Install
-------

Download OCRmyPDF here: https://github.com/fritz-hh/OCRmyPDF/releases

Copy the file in onto your linux/unix machine and extract it.

Run: "sh ./OCRmyPDF.sh -h" to get the script usage

If not yet installed, the script will notify you about dependencies that need to be installed

Support
-------

In case you detect an issue, please:

- Check if your issue is already known
- if no problem report exists on github, please create one here: https://github.com/fritz-hh/OCRmyPDF/issues
- Describe your problem thoroughly
- Append the console output of the script when running the debug mode (-g option)
- If possible provide your input PDF file as well as the content of the temporary folder (using a file sharing service like www.file-upload.net)

Press & Media
-------------

- c't 1-2014, page 59: Detailed presentation of OCRmyPDF v1.0 in the leading german IT magazine (c't)