OCRmyPDF uses `semantic versioning <http://semver.org/>`_ for its command line interface.
The OCRmyPDF package itself does not contain a public API, although it is fairly stable and breaking changes are usually timed with a major release. A future release will clearly define the stable public API.
- When using Tesseract 3.05.01 or newer, OCRmyPDF will select the "sandwich" PDF renderer by default, unless another PDF renderer is specified with the ``--pdf-renderer`` argument. The previous behavior was to select ``--pdf-renderer=hocr``.
- The "tesseract" PDF renderer is now deprecated, since it can cause problems with Ghostscript on Tesseract 3.05.00
- The "tess4" PDF renderer has been renamed to "sandwich". "tess4" is now a deprecated alias for "sandwich".
- Files with pages larger than 200" (5080 mm) in either dimension are now supported with ``--output-type=pdf`` with the page size preserved (in the PDF specification this feature is called UserUnit scaling). Due to Ghostscript limitations this is not available in conjunction with PDF/A output.
- Fixed issue #169, exception due to failure to create sidecar text files on some versions of Tesseract 3.04, including the jbarlow83/ocrmypdf Docker image
+ Support for Python 3.4 dropped. Python 3.5 is now required.
+ Support for Tesseract 3.02 and 3.03 dropped. Tesseract 3.04 or newer is required. Tesseract 4.00 (alpha) is supported.
+ The OCRmyPDF.sh script was removed.
- Add a new feature, ``--sidecar``, which allows creating "sidecar" text files which contain the OCR results in plain text. These OCR text is more reliable than extracting text from PDFs. Closes #126.
- New feature: ``--pdfa-image-compression``, which allows overriding Ghostscript's lossy-or-lossless image encoding heuristic and making all images JPEG encoded or lossless encoded as desired. Fixes #163.
- Fixed issue #143, added ``--quiet`` to suppress "INFO" messages
- Fixed issue #164, a typo
- Removed the command line parameters ``-n`` and ``--just-print`` since they have not worked for some time (reported as Ubuntu bug `#1687308 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ocrmypdf/+bug/1687308>`_)
- Fixed issue #156, 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'getObject' on pages with no optional /Contents record. This should resolve all issues related to pages with no /Contents record.
- Fixed issue #158, ocrmypdf now stops and terminates if Ghostscript fails on an intermediate step, as it is not possible to proceed.
- Fixed issue #160, exception thrown on certain invalid arguments instead of error message
- Added a workaround for Ghostscript 9.21 and probably earlier versions would fail with the error message "VMerror -25", due to a Ghostscript bug in XMP metadata handling
- High Unicode characters (U+10000 and up) are no longer accepted for setting metadata on the command line, as Ghostscript may not handle them correctly.
- Fix issue #147. ``--pdf-renderer tess4 --clean`` will produce an oversized page containing the original image in the bottom left corner, due to loss DPI information.
- Fix issue #137, proportions of images with a non-square pixel aspect ratio would be distorted in output for ``--force-ocr`` and some other combinations of flags
- Exotic PDFs containing "Form XObjects" are now supported (issue #134; PDF reference manual 8.10), and images they contain are taken into account when determining the resolution for rasterizing
- The Tesseract 4 Docker image no longer includes all languages, because it took so long to build something would tend to fail
- OCRmyPDF now warns about using ``--pdf-renderer tesseract`` with Tesseract 3.04 or lower due to issues with Ghostscript corrupting the OCR text in these cases
- The Docker images (ocrmypdf, ocrmypdf-polyglot, ocrmypdf-tess4) are now based on Ubuntu 16.10 instead of Debian stretch
+ This makes supporting the Tesseract 4 image easier
+ This could be a disruptive change for any Docker users who built customized these images with their own changes, and made those changes in a way that depends on Debian and not Ubuntu
- OCRmyPDF now prevents running the Tesseract 4 renderer with Tesseract 3.04, which was permitted in v4.4 and v4.4.1 but will not work
- To prevent a `TIFF output error <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/2206>`_ caused by img2pdf >= 0.2.1 and Pillow <= 3.4.2, dependencies have been tightened
- Tesseract 4.00 is now supported on an experimental basis.
+ A new rendering option ``--pdf-renderer tess4`` exploits Tesseract 4's new text-only output PDF mode. See the documentation on PDF Renderers for details.
+ The ``--tesseract-oem`` argument allows control over the Tesseract 4 OCR engine mode (tesseract's ``--oem``). Use ``--tesseract-oem 2`` to enforce the new LSTM mode.
- Fixed an issue where pages produced by the "hocr" renderer after a Tesseract timeout would be rotated incorrectly if the input page was rotated with a /Rotate marker
- Fixed a file handle leak in LeptonicaErrorTrap that would cause a "too many open files" error for files around hundred pages of pages long when ``--deskew`` or ``--remove-background`` or other Leptonica based image processing features were in use, depending on the system value of ``ulimit -n``
- Ability to specify multiple languages for multilingual documents is now advertised in documentation
- Reduced the file sizes of some test resources
- Cleaned up debug output
- Tesseract caching in test cases is now more cautious about false cache hits and reproducing exact output, not that any problems were observed
- Fixed an error (#90) caused by PDFs that use stencil masks properly
- Fixed handling of PDFs that try to draw images or stencil masks without properly setting up the graphics state (such images are now ignored for the purposes of calculating DPI)
+ This is a basic convenience feature. It only supports a single image and always makes the image fill the whole page.
+ For better control over image to PDF conversion, use ``img2pdf`` (one of ocrmypdf's dependencies)
- New argument ``--output-type {pdf|pdfa}`` allows disabling Ghostscript PDF/A generation
+``pdfa`` is the default, consistent with past behavior
+``pdf`` provides a workaround for users concerned about the increase in file size from Ghostscript forcing JBIG2 images to CCITT and transcoding JPEGs
+``pdf`` preserves as much as it can about the original file, including problems that PDF/A conversion fixes
- PDFs containing images with "non-square" pixel aspect ratios, such as 200x100 DPI, are now handled and converted properly (fixing a bug that caused to be cropped)
-``--force-ocr`` rasterizes pages even if they contain no images
+ supports users who want to use OCRmyPDF to reconstruct text information in PDFs with damaged Unicode maps (copy and paste text does not match displayed text)
+ supports reinterpreting PDFs where text was rendered as curves for printing, and text needs to be recovered
- Bug fix: monochrome images with an ICC profile attached were incorrectly converted to full color images if lossless reconstruction was not possible due to other settings; consequence was increased file size for these images
-``--rotate-pages`` now only rotates pages when reasonably confidence in the orientation. This behavior can be adjusted with the new argument ``--rotate-pages-threshold``
- Fixed problems in error checking if ``unpaper`` is uninstalled or missing at run-time
- Fixed problems with "RethrownJobError" errors during error handling that suppressed the useful error messages
OCRmyPDF versions 1 and 2 were implemented as shell scripts. OCRmyPDF 3.0+ is a fork that gradually replaced all shell scripts with Python while maintaining the existing command line arguments. No one is maintaining old versions.
For details on older versions, see the `final version of its release notes <https://github.com/fritz-hh/OCRmyPDF/blob/7fd3dbdf42ca53a619412ce8add7532c5e81a9d1/RELEASE_NOTES.md>`_.
