pypdfocr 0.2

Converts a scanned PDF into an OCR'ed pdf using Tesseract-OCR and Ghostscript

This script will take a pdf file and generate the corresponding OCR’ed version.

Usage:

Single conversion:

python pypdfocr.py filename.pdf

--> filename_ocr.pdf will be generated

Folder monitoring (new!):

python pypdfocr.py -w watch_directory

--> Every time a pdf file is added to `watch_directory` it will be OCR'ed

For those on Windows, because it’s such a pain to get all the PIL and PDF dependencies installed, I’ve gone ahead and made an executable available under:

dist/pypdfocr.exe

You still need to install Tesseract and GhostScript as detailed below in the dependencies list.

Caveats

This code is brand-new, and is barely commented with no unit-tests included. I plan to improve things as time allows in the near-future.

Dependencies:

PyPDFOCR relies on the following (free) programs being installed and in the path:

• Tesseract OCR software https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

• GhostScript http://www.ghostscript.com/

• PIL (Python Imaging Library) http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/

• ReportLab (PDF generation library) http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/

• Watchdog (Cross-platform fhlesystem events monitoring) https://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog

On Mac OS X, you can install the first two using homebrew:

brew install tesseract
brew install ghostscript

The last three can be installed using a regular python manager such as pip:

pip install pil
pip install reportlab
pip install watchdog