Cookbook ======== Basic examples -------------- Help! """"" ocrmypdf has built-in help. .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --help Add an OCR layer and convert to PDF/A """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf Add an OCR layer and output a standard PDF """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --output-type pdf input.pdf output.pdf Create a PDF/A with all color and grayscale images converted to JPEG """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --output-type pdfa --pdfa-image-compression jpeg input.pdf output.pdf Modify a file in place """""""""""""""""""""" The file will only be overwritten if OCRmyPDF is successful. .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf myfile.pdf myfile.pdf Correct page rotation """"""""""""""""""""" 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. If the page is "just a little off horizontal", like a crooked picture, then you want ``--deskew``. ``--rotate-pages`` is for when the cardinal angle is wrong. OCR languages other than English """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 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 `. Produce PDF and text file containing OCR text """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" This produces a file named "output.pdf" and a companion text file named "output.txt". .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --sidecar output.txt input.pdf output.pdf OCR images, not PDFs -------------------- If you are starting with images, you can just use Tesseract 3.04 or later directly to convert images to PDFs: .. code-block:: bash tesseract my-image.jpg output-prefix pdf .. code-block:: bash # When there are multiple images tesseract text-file-containing-list-of-image-filenames.txt output-prefix pdf Tesseract's PDF output is quite good – OCRmyPDF uses it by internally by default. However, OCRmyPDF has many features not available in Tesseract like like image processing, metadata control, and PDF/A generation. Use a program like `img2pdf `_ to convert your images to PDFs, and then pipe the results to run ocrmypdf. The `-` tells ocrmypdf to read standard input. .. code-block:: bash img2pdf my-images*.jpg | ocrmypdf - myfile.pdf ``img2pdf`` is recommended because it does an excellent job at generating PDFs without transcoding images. For convenience, OCRmyPDF can also convert single images to PDFs on its own. If the resolution (dots per inch, DPI) of an image is not set or is incorrect, it can be overridden with ``--image-dpi``. (As 1 inch is 2.54 cm, 1 dpi = 0.39 dpcm). .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --image-dpi 300 image.png myfile.pdf If you have multiple images, you must use ``img2pdf`` to convert the images to PDF. .. note:: ImageMagick ``convert`` can also convert a group of images to PDF, but in the author's experience it takes a long time, transcodes unnecessarily and gives poor results. 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 `_ algorithm as implemented in `Leptonica `_. * ``--clean`` uses `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. .. note:: In many cases image processing will rasterize PDF pages as images, potentially losing quality. .. warning:: ``--clean-final`` and ``-remove-background`` may leave undesirable visual artifacts in some images where their algorithms have shortcomings. Files should be visually reviewed after using these options. OCR and correct document skew (crooked scan) """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 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 Don't actually OCR my PDF """"""""""""""""""""""""" If you set ``--tesseract-timeout 0`` OCRmyPDF will apply its image processing without performing OCR, if all you want to is to apply image processing or PDF/A conversion. .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --tesseract-timeout=0 --remove-background input.pdf output.pdf Redo OCR """""""" To redo OCR on a file OCRed with other OCR software or a previous version of OCRmyPDF and/or Tesseract, you may use the ``--force-ocr`` argument. Normally, OCRmyPDF does not modify files that already appear to contain OCR text. .. code-block:: bash ocrmypdf --force-ocr input.pdf output.pdf Note that the method above will force rasterization of all pages, potentially reducing quality or losing vector content. To ensure quality is preserved, one could extract all of the images and rebuild the PDF for a lossless transformation. This recipe does not work when PDFs contain multiple images per page, as many do in practice. It will also lose any page rotation information. .. code-block:: bash pdfimages -all old-ocr.pdf prefix # extract all images img2pdf -o temp.pdf prefix* # construct new PDF from the images # review the new PDF to ensure it visually matches the old one ocrmypdf --output-type pdf temp.pdf new-ocr.pdf ``--output-type pdf`` is used here to avoid using Ghostscript which will also rasterize images. Improving OCR quality --------------------- The `Image processing`_ features can improve OCR quality. Rotating pages and deskewing helps to ensure that the page orientation is correct before OCR begins. Removing the background and/or cleaning the page can also improve results. The ``--oversample DPI`` argument can be specified to resample images to higher resolution before attempting OCR; this can improve results as well. OCR quality will suffer if the resolution of input images is not correct (since the range of pixel sizes that will be checked for possible fonts will also be incorrect).