OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) using Docker and ocrmypdf.

Single PDF

Replace the filename.pdf:

in="filename.pdf"
tmp="${in%.pdf}_ocr.pdf"

docker run --rm -u $(id -u):$(id -g) \
  -v "$(pwd)":/mnt jbarlow83/ocrmypdf \
  --language eng+deu \
  "/mnt/$in" "/mnt/$tmp"

PDF Batches

To OCR all PDFs in a folder:

1. Place your input files in a pdfs/ directory.
2. Run the following shell script to OCR each file using English and German (eng+deu) language support:

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing PDFs
PDF_DIR="./pdfs"
# Output directory
OUTPUT_DIR="./ocr_output"

# Create output directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p "$OUTPUT_DIR"

# Iterate over all PDF files in the directory
for pdf_file in "$PDF_DIR"/*.pdf; do
    # Get the base filename (without path)
    base_name=$(basename "$pdf_file")
    output_file="$OUTPUT_DIR/$base_name"

    echo "Processing: $pdf_file"
    
    docker run --rm -u $(id -u):$(id -g) \
        -v "$(pwd)":/mnt jbarlow83/ocrmypdf \
        --language eng+deu \
        "/mnt/${pdf_file}" "/mnt/${output_file}"

    echo "Saved OCR'd file to: $output_file"
done