OCRmyPDF/docs/cookbook.rst

Cookbook
========

Basic examples
--------------

Help!
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ocrmypdf has built-in help.

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --help


Add an OCR layer and convert to PDF/A
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.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf

Add an OCR layer and output a standard PDF
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.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --output-type pdf input.pdf output.pdf

Modify a file in place
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The file will only be overwritten if OCRmyPDF is successful.

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf myfile.pdf myfile.pdf

Correct page rotation
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OCR will attempt to automatic correct the rotation of each page. This can help fix a scanning job that contains a mix of landscape and portrait pages.

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --rotate-pages myfile.pdf myfile.pdf

You can increase (decrease) the parameter ``--rotate-pages-threshold`` to make page rotation more (less) aggressive.


OCR languages other than English
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By default OCRmyPDF assumes the document is English. 

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf -l fre LeParisien.pdf LeParisien.pdf
	ocrmypdf -l eng+fre Bilingual-English-French.pdf Bilingual-English-French.pdf

Language packs must be installed for all languages specified. See :ref:`Installing additional language packs <languages>`.


Produce PDF and text file containing OCR text
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This produces a file named "output.pdf" and a companion text file named "output.txt". The ``pdftotext`` program from 
`Poppler <https://poppler.freedesktop.org/>`_ is used to extract text from the finished PDF.

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf input.pdf - | tee output.pdf | pdftotext - output.txt


OCR images, not PDFs
--------------------

Use a program like `img2pdf <https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/img2pdf>`_ to convert your images to PDFs, and then pipe the results to run ocrmypdf:

.. code-block:: bash

	img2pdf my-images*.jpg | ocrmypdf - myfile.pdf

If given a single image as input, OCRmyPDF will try converting it to a PDF on its own.  If the DPI specified in the image is incorrect, it can be overridden with ``--image-dpi``:

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --image-dpi 300 image.png myfile.pdf

This feature may be removed at some point, because OCRmyPDF does not specialize in converting images to PDFs.

You can also use Tesseract 3.04+ directly to convert single page images or multi-page TIFFs to PDF:

.. code-block:: bash

	tesseract my-image.jpg output-prefix pdf 

Image processing
----------------

OCRmyPDF perform some image processing on each page of a PDF, if desired.  The same processing is applied to each page.  It is suggested that the user review files after image processing as these commands might remove desirable content, especially from poor quality scans.

* ``--rotate-pages`` attempts to determine the correct orientation for each page and rotates the page if necessary.

* ``--remove-background`` attempts to detect and remove a noisy background from grayscale or color images.  Monochrome images are ignored. This should not be used on documents that contain color photos as it may remove them.

* ``--deskew`` will correct pages were scanned at a skewed angle by rotating them back into place.  Skew determination and correction is performed using `Postl's variance of line sums <http://www.leptonica.com/skew-measurement.html>`_ algorithm as implemented in `Leptonica <http://www.leptonica.com/index.html>`_.
  
* ``--clean`` uses `unpaper <https://www.flameeyes.eu/projects/unpaper>`_ to clean up pages before OCR, but does not alter the final output.  This makes it less likely that OCR will try to find text in background noise.

* ``--clean-final`` uses unpaper to clean up pages before OCR and inserts the page into the final output.  You will want to review each page to ensure that unpaper did not remove something important.


OCR and correct document skew (crooked scan)
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Deskew:

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --deskew input.pdf output.pdf

Image processing commands can be combined. The order in which options are given does not matter. OCRmyPDF always applies the steps of the image processing pipeline in the same order (rotate, remove background, deskew, clean).

.. code-block:: bash

	ocrmypdf --deskew --clean --rotate-pages input.pdf output.pdf

Control of OCR options
----------------------

By default, OCRmyPDF permits tesseract to run for only three minutes (180 seconds) per page. This is usually more than enough time to find all text on a reasonably sized page with modern hardware. A skipped page will be inserted into the output without any OCR text.

If you want to adjust the amount of time spent on OCR, change ``--tesseract-timeout``.  You can also automatically skip images that exceed a certain number of megapixels.

.. code-block:: bash

	# Allow 300 seconds for OCR; skip any page larger than 50 megapixels
	ocrmypdf --tesseract-timeout 300 --skip-big 50 bigfile.pdf output.pdf