PDF OCR Tool

Convert scanned or poorly OCR'd PDFs into searchable PDFs with selectable text using Tesseract OCR.

Features

• 🎯 High-quality OCR using Tesseract 5.x
• 📄 Creates searchable PDFs with invisible text layer
• 🎨 Interactive, user-friendly command-line interface
• ⚡ Fast processing with configurable DPI (default: 300)
• 🎭 Process entire PDFs or specific page ranges

Prerequisites

Install system dependencies first:

macOS:

brew install tesseract poppler

Linux (Ubuntu/Debian):

sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr poppler-utils

Quick Start

Option 1: Run Directly from GitHub (Easiest - No Installation!)

uvx --from git+https://github.com/sameerbajaj/pdf-ocr pdf-ocr

That's it! The tool will run directly without any installation.

Option 2: Clone and Run Locally

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/sameerbajaj/pdf-ocr.git
cd pdf-ocr

# Run directly
uvx --from . pdf-ocr

Option 3: Install Permanently

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/sameerbajaj/pdf-ocr.git
cd pdf-ocr
uv pip install -e .
source .venv/bin/activate

# Run from anywhere
pdf-ocr

Usage

Interactive Mode (Recommended)

Simply run the command and follow the friendly prompts:

pdf-ocr

The tool will ask you:

1. Which PDF file? - You can type the path or drag & drop the file
2. Which pages? - Enter a range like 4-5, a single page like 7, or press Enter for all pages

Command-Line Mode

# Process entire PDF
pdf-ocr document.pdf

# Process specific pages
pdf-ocr document.pdf --pages 4-5
pdf-ocr document.pdf -p 1-10

# Custom output
pdf-ocr document.pdf --output result.pdf

# Save text files too
pdf-ocr document.pdf --save-text

# Higher quality (slower)
pdf-ocr document.pdf --dpi 400

Examples

# Process pages 4-5 of a book
pdf-ocr book.pdf --pages 4-5

# Process chapter (pages 20-40) with text export
pdf-ocr textbook.pdf -p 20-40 --save-text

# High-quality scan of a single page
pdf-ocr scan.pdf --pages 7 --dpi 600

Output

The tool generates:

• filename_ocr.pdf or filename_pages4-5_ocr.pdf - Searchable PDF with text layer
• filename_pageX.txt (optional) - Plain text files if --save-text is used

All files are saved in the same directory as the input PDF.

Troubleshooting

Command not found:

source .venv/bin/activate

Tesseract not installed:

brew install tesseract  # macOS
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr  # Linux

Poppler not installed:

brew install poppler  # macOS
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils  # Linux

Development

# Setup for development
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/pdf-ocr-tool.git
cd pdf-ocr-tool
uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run from source
python -m pdf_ocr_tool.cli

Project Structure

pdf-ocr-tool/
├── pdf_ocr_tool/          # Main package
│   ├── cli.py            # Command-line interface
│   ├── ocr.py            # OCR processing
│   └── pdf_utils.py      # PDF generation
├── pyproject.toml        # Package configuration
├── setup.sh              # Auto-installer script
└── README.md             # This file

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

• Tesseract OCR
• pdf2image
• Rich

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Part of the open-source tools collection by Sameer Bajaj. Learn more on the project page.