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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