OCRmyPDF

OCRmyPDF makes scanned PDFs searchable and lets readers copy recognized text from them. It's a command-line tool for people digitizing paper records and developers adding OCR to document workflows.

• Searchable text: Place recognized text beneath scanned images with accurate alignment, preserving original image resolution and leaving other PDF content intact where possible.
• Scan cleanup: Optionally straighten or clean page images before recognition and optimize PDF images to reduce file size.
• Archival output: Produce PDF/A files for long-term storage and validate input and output PDFs.
• Language support: Tesseract language packs handle recognition, including documents containing multiple languages.
• Alternative OCR engines: Plugins can replace Tesseract with Apple Vision on macOS, EasyOCR or GPU-accelerated PaddleOCR.

OCRmyPDF processes documents locally and is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD, with Docker images for x64 and ARM. The standard setup requires Tesseract and Ghostscript and uses available CPU cores to process pages in parallel.

A GPU is strongly recommended for the EasyOCR plugin. For collections that need a searchable document management interface, paperless-ngx integrates OCRmyPDF into its processing workflow.