Users who previously installed OCRmyPDF on macOS using ``pip install ocrmypdf`` should remove the pip version (``pip3 uninstall ocrmypdf``) before switching to the Homebrew version.
OCRmyPDF will use all available CPU cores. By default, the VirtualBox machine instance on Windows and macOS has only a single CPU core enabled. Use the VirtualBox Manager to determine the name of your Docker engine host, and then follow these optional steps to enable multiple CPUs:
The alternative "polyglot" image provides `all available language packs <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/doc/tesseract.1.asc#languages>`_.
To execute the OCRmyPDF on a local file, you must `provide a writable volume to the Docker image <https://docs.docker.com/userguide/dockervolumes/>`_, and both the input and output file must be inside the writable volume. This example command uses the current working directory as the writable volume:
..code-block:: bash
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/home/docker" <other docker arguments> ocrmypdf <your arguments to ocrmypdf>
In this worked example, the current working directory contains an input file called ``test.pdf`` and the output will go to ``output.pdf``:
..code-block:: bash
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/home/docker" ocrmypdf --skip-text test.pdf output.pdf
Note that ``ocrmypdf`` has its own separate ``-v VERBOSITYLEVEL`` argument to control debug verbosity. All Docker arguments should before the ``ocrmypdf`` image name and all arguments to ``ocrmypdf`` should be listed after.
Installing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty) is more difficult than some other options, because of bugs in Python package installation and because OCRmyPDF depends on some packages newer than are available in the main distribution.
Add new "apt" repositories needed for backports of Ghostscript 9.16, libav-11 (for unpaper 6.1) and Tesseract 4.00 (alpha). This will replace Ghostscript and Tesseract 3.x on your system. If you prefer to not modify your system in this matter, consider using a Docker container.
These installation instructions omit the optional dependency ``unpaper``, which is only available at version 0.4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04. The author could not find a backport of ``unpaper``, and created a .deb package to do the job of installing unpaper 6.1 (for x86 64-bit only):
The author is aware of an `ArchLinux package for ocrmypdf <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ocrmypdf/>`_. It seems like the following command might work.
Direct installation on Windows is not possible. Install the _`Docker` container as described above. Ensure that your command prompt can run the docker "hello world" container.
Running on Windows
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The command line syntax to run ocrmypdf from a command prompt will resemble:
..code-block:: bat
docker run -v /c/Users/sampleuser:/home/docker ocrmypdf --skip-text test.pdf output.pdf
where /c/Users/sampleuser is a Unix representation of the Windows path C:\\Users\\sampleuser, assuming a user named "sampleuser" is running ocrmypdf on a file in their home directory, and the files "test.pdf" and "output.pdf" are in the sampleuser folder. The Windows user must have read and write permissions.
Or, to install in `development mode <https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/setuptools.html#development-mode>`_, allowing customization of OCRmyPDF, use the ``-e`` flag: