legacylipi 0.7.0

Legacy Font PDF Translator - Translate PDFs with legacy Indian font encodings to English

LegacyLipi

Legacy Font PDF Translator - Translate PDF documents with legacy Indian font encodings to English.

Installation

From PyPI (Recommended)

pip install legacylipi

Or with uv:

uv tool install legacylipi

From Source

git clone https://github.com/biswasbiplob/legacylipi.git
cd legacylipi
uv sync

Usage

# CLI translation
legacylipi translate input.pdf -o output.txt

# Launch web UI
legacylipi ui

# Launch UI on custom port
legacylipi ui --port 3000

Problem

Millions of government documents, legal papers, and archival materials in Indian regional languages (Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, etc.) were created using legacy font encoding systems (Shree-Lipi, Kruti Dev, APS, Chanakya, etc.). These fonts map Devanagari/regional script glyphs to ASCII/Latin code points, making them unreadable by standard translation tools.

Example:

• What the PDF displays: महाराष्ट्र राजभाषा अधिनियम
• What text extraction produces: ´ÖÆüÖ¸üÖ™Òü ¸üÖ•Ö³ÖÖÂÖÖ †×¬Ö×®ÖμÖ´Ö
• What Google Translate sees: Gibberish

Solution

LegacyLipi:

1. Detects the font encoding scheme used in a PDF (legacy or Unicode)
2. Converts legacy-encoded text to proper Unicode
3. Alternatively, uses OCR to extract text from scanned PDFs
4. Translates the Unicode text to the target language
5. Outputs translated text in various formats (text, markdown, PDF)

Installation

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/biswasbiplob/legacylipi.git
cd legacylipi
uv sync

# With all optional backends
uv sync --all-extras

OCR Support (Optional)

LegacyLipi supports multiple OCR backends:

Backend	Description	GPU Support
Tesseract	Local, free, most language packs	CPU only
Google Vision	Cloud, paid, best accuracy	N/A
EasyOCR	Local, free, good for Indian languages	CUDA, MPS (Apple Silicon)

Tesseract (default):

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-mar tesseract-ocr-hin

# macOS
brew install tesseract tesseract-lang

EasyOCR with GPU (optional):

# Install with EasyOCR support
uv sync --extra easyocr

# For GPU acceleration, install PyTorch with CUDA or MPS support

Google Vision (optional):

uv sync --extra vision
# Requires GCP credentials (GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS)

See docs/cli-reference.md for detailed OCR options and language codes.

Quick Start

# Basic translation
uv run legacylipi translate input.pdf -o output.txt

# Output as PDF (preserves layout)
uv run legacylipi translate input.pdf -o output.pdf --format pdf

# OCR for scanned documents
uv run legacylipi translate input.pdf --use-ocr -o output.txt

# Use local LLM (requires Ollama)
uv run legacylipi translate input.pdf --translator ollama --model llama3.2

# Detect encoding only
uv run legacylipi detect input.pdf

See docs/cli-reference.md for complete CLI documentation.

Web UI

LegacyLipi includes a web interface for easy PDF translation without command-line usage.

uv run legacylipi-ui

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

Features:

• Drag-and-drop PDF upload
• Multiple translation backends
• OCR support with language selection
• Structure-preserving or flowing text modes
• Real-time progress tracking
• Direct download of translated files

Translation Backends

Backend	Description	Setup
trans	translate-shell CLI (recommended)	brew install translate-shell
google	Google Translate (free API)	Works out of the box
mymemory	MyMemory API (free)	Works out of the box
ollama	Local LLM via Ollama	Ollama required
openai	OpenAI GPT models	Set OPENAI_API_KEY
gcp_cloud	Google Cloud Translation	GCP project + credentials

See docs/translation-backends.md for detailed setup guides.

Supported Encodings

Encoding	Font Family	Language	Status
shree-lipi	Shree-Lipi, Shree-Dev-0714	Marathi	✅ Built-in
kruti-dev	Kruti Dev	Hindi	✅ Built-in
aps-dv	APS-DV	Hindi	🔄 Detection only
chanakya	Chanakya	Hindi	🔄 Detection only
dvb-tt	DVB-TT, DV-TTYogesh	Hindi	🔄 Detection only
walkman-chanakya	Walkman Chanakya	Hindi	🔄 Detection only
shusha	Shusha	Hindi	🔄 Detection only

CLI Commands

Command	Description
translate	Full pipeline: parse → detect → convert → translate → output
convert	Convert legacy encoding to Unicode (no translation)
extract	Extract text from PDF (OCR or font-based)
detect	Analyze PDF and report detected encoding
encodings	List supported font encodings
usage	Show API usage statistics

See docs/cli-reference.md for full command reference.

Development

See docs/development.md for setup instructions, running tests, project structure, and adding new encodings.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                              LegacyLipi                                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                         │
│  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
│  │                      Text Extraction                             │   │
│  │  ┌──────────────┐              ┌──────────────┐                  │   │
│  │  │   PDF        │    OR        │   OCR        │                  │   │
│  │  │   Parser     │              │   Parser     │                  │   │
│  │  │ (font-based) │              │ (Tesseract)  │                  │   │
│  │  └──────────────┘              └──────────────┘                  │   │
│  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
│         │                                │                              │
│         ▼                                ▼                              │
│  ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐                                   │
│  │   Encoding   │───▶│   Unicode    │◀──── (OCR output is               │
│  │   Detector   │    │   Converter  │       already Unicode)            │
│  └──────────────┘    └──────────────┘                                   │
│                             │                                           │
│                             ▼                                           │
│         ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
│         │                 Translation Engine                        │   │
│         │  ┌────────┬────────┬──────────┬────────┬────────┬─────┐   │   │
│         │  │ trans  │ Google │ MyMemory │ Ollama │ OpenAI │ GCP │   │   │
│         │  │ (CLI)  │ Trans. │  (API)   │(Local) │ (API)  │Cloud│   │   │
│         │  └────────┴────────┴──────────┴────────┴────────┴─────┘   │   │
│         └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
│                             │                                           │
│                             ▼                                           │
│         ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐               │
│         │            Output Generator                   │               │
│         │  ┌──────┬────────┬───────┐                    │               │
│         │  │ .txt │  .md   │ .pdf  │                    │               │
│         │  └──────┴────────┴───────┘                    │               │
│         └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘               │
│                                                                         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Pipeline Flow:

1. Parse PDF → Extract text with PDF parser or OCR
2. Detect Encoding → Identify legacy encoding scheme
3. Convert to Unicode → Transform legacy text to Unicode
4. Translate → Use translation backend
5. Generate Output → Create PDF/text/markdown

License

MIT

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Make your changes
4. Run tests (uv run pytest)
5. Commit and push
6. Open a Pull Request