OCRmyPDF

Script aimed at performing optical character recognition (OCR) on PDF files from PDF files containing only images

Usage: ./OCRmyPDF.sh filename.pdf

ATTENTION: THE SCRIPTS ARE STILL IN DEVELOPMENT PHASE, PLEASE DO NOT USE !!!!

Features

Generates a searchable PDF/A file from PDF file containing only images
Keeps the original resolution of the embedded images
Validation of the generated file against the PDF/A specification using jhove

Motivation

I searched the web for a free tool to OCR PDF files on linux/unix and found many but none of them was satisfying.

Either they produced PDF files with misplaced text below the image (making copy/paste impossible)
Or they changed the resolution of the embedded images
Or they generated PDF file having a rediculous 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

TODO

Install java: cd /usr/ports/java/openjdk7/ && make install clean

Install jhove: download jhove from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jhove/files/jhove/ After extracting the JHOVE files to some directory "jhove", you have to edit the file "jhove/conf/jhove.conf" and change something in "something" to the actual directory (ending in "/jhove").