Utilities

Excellent Utilities: OCRmyPDF – add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

Summary

OCRmyPDF is a great utility. It receives our strong recommendation. It’s easy to install, it works really well, and there’s a lot of options available. OCRmyPDF has all you need to work efficiently. It produces valid PDFs, handles accents and multilingual characters, and doesn’t bloat the output file. We particularly like that the program uses unpaper, which offers a great range of image processing filters to improve images.

Out of the whole process, only the OCR phase actually makes use of more than 1 core of your CPU. The other parts of the process would really benefit from multi-core support although you can use the GNU Parallel utility to apply OCRmyPDF simultaneously to multiple files.

There are issues that can affect the quality of the OCR output, such as poor image quality of the scanned document, a mixture of fonts used in the scanned documents, the italicized and underlining of fonts, all of which can blur the quality and shape of the individual characters. Because of this, it is much more difficult to ensure that the character that is “recognized” by the OCR software is the character on the scanned document. Fortunately, Tesseract has very good accuracy although it doesn’t recognize handwriting, and has problems with documents with multiple columns. But there isn’t a better open source tool available.

OCRmyPDF is under active development, seeing regular updates roughly on a fortnightly basis. The project has attracted more than 2,500 GitHub stars. There’s clear and concise documentation available.

OCRmyPDF is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Website: github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
Support: Documentation
Developer: James R. Barlow and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary


Complete list of articles in this series:

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CerebroFast application launcher
cheat.shCommunity driven unified cheat sheet
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ezaA turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command
Extension ManagerBrowse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions
fdWonderful alternative to the venerable find
fkillKill processes quick and easy
fontpreviewQuickly search and preview fonts
horcruxFile splitter with encryption and redundancy
KoohaSimple screen recorder
KOReaderDocument viewer for a wide variety of file formats
ImagineA simple yet effective image optimization tool
LanguageToolStyle and grammar checker for 30+ languages
Liquid PromptAdaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh
lnavAdvanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting
lsdLike exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls
Mark TextSimple and elegant Markdown editor
McFlyNavigate through your bash shell history
mdlessFormatted and highlighted view of Markdown files
notiMonitors a command or process and triggers a notification
NushellFlexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel
nvitopGPU process management for NVIDIA graphics cards
OCRmyPDFAdd OCR text layer to scanned PDFs
Oh My ZshFramework to manage your Zsh configuration
PaperworkDesigned to simplify the management of your paperwork
pastelGenerate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors
PDF Mix ToolPerform common editing operations on PDF files
pecoSimple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful
ripgrepRecursively search directories for a regex pattern
RnoteSketch and take handwritten notes
scrcpyDisplay and control Android devices
StickySimulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop
tldrSimplified and community-driven man pages
tmuxA terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow
TuskAn unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential
UlauncherSublime application launcher
WatsonTrack the time spent on projects
Whoogle SearchSelf-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine
ZellijTerminal workspace with batteries included
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