Take a PDF, OCR it, and add OCR Text as background layer to original PDF to make it searchable

ocrpdf.sh

#!/bin/sh

# Take a PDF, OCR it, and add OCR Text as background layer to original PDF to make it searchable.
# Hacked together using tips from these websites:
#      http://www.jlaundry.com/2012/ocr-a-scanned-pdf-with-tesseract/
#      http://askubuntu.com/questions/27097/how-to-print-a-regular-file-to-pdf-from-command-line
# Dependencies: pdftk, tesseract, imagemagick, enscript, ps2pdf
# Would be nice to use hocr2pdf instead so that the text lines up with the PDF image.
#      http://www.exactcode.com/site/open_source/exactimage/hocr2pdf/

cp $1 $1.bak
pdftk $1 burst output tesspage_%02d.pdf
for file in `ls tesspage*`
do
    PAGE=$(basename "$file" .pdf)
  # Convert the PDF page into a TIFF file
    convert -monochrome -density 600 $file "$PAGE".tif
  # OCR the TIFF file and save text to output.txt
    tesseract "$PAGE".tif output
  # Turn text file outputed by tesseract into a PDF, then put it in background of original page
    enscript output.txt -B -o - | ps2pdf - output.pdf && pdftk $file background output.pdf output new-"$file"
  # Clean up
    rm output*
    rm "$file"
    rm *.tif
done
pdftk new* cat output $1

tesseract can now produce PDF with embedded text directly using the PDF config option. It's used something like this:

tesseract input.tif outputbase pdf

which would create outputbase.pdf

tesseract can now produce PDF with embedded text directly using the PDF config option. It's used something like this:

tesseract input.tif outputbase pdf

which would create outputbase.pdf

scruss,
Thank you for stating that! That simplifies the process significantly! Plus I now have all the packages on our server needed to convert PDFs to embedded text PDFs. I do not have to go through our IT approval process to get ocrmypdf installed, tesseract can do it.
Thanks!

I would say that the most modern variant is ocrmypdf, which is a nice wrapper above tesseract and is adding some extra features. Its natively in linux repos.

ocrmypdf

That's what I mostly use now. But this gist served me well for years

I would say that the most modern variant is ocrmypdf, which is a nice wrapper above tesseract and is adding some extra features. Its natively in linux repos.

Available...yes and no. ocrmypdf isn't available on all corporate repos, but tesseract is more available. I ran into this at a former workplace that did a lot of DoD type work and had a pretty restrictive Linux VM. ocrmypdf wasn't readily available, however tesseract was.