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From: Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>
To: Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>
Cc: coff <coff@tuhs.org>
Subject: [COFF] Re: converting lousy scans of pdfs into something more useable
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2023 08:01:37 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8B9903EF-9F35-4810-85DD-F8629EC67973@iitbombay.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <bafc6b83-d14b-1a68-5480-23ad75ef22f4@gmail.com>

On Feb 3, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> what's your experience with using sad pdfs? Do you just live with them as they are, or do you try to fix them and how, or do you use a workflow and get good results?

Usually I just live with them but I may use "ocrmypdf" if search
or copy-paste is unsatisfactory.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

It's a python script that runs most any unix and uses
tesseract. Its author's motivation seems similar to yours:

I searched the web for a free command line tool to OCR PDF files: I found many, but none of them were really satisfying:
    • Either they produced PDF files with misplaced text under the image (making copy/paste impossible)
    • Or they did not handle accents and multilingual characters
    • Or they changed the resolution of the embedded images
    • Or they generated ridiculously large PDF files
    • Or they crashed when trying to OCR
    • Or they did not produce valid PDF files
    • On top of that none of them produced PDF/A files (format dedicated for long time storage)
...so I decided to develop my own tool.

I rarely print PDFs any more.

  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-02-03 16:03 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-02-03 15:27 [COFF] " Will Senn
2023-02-03 16:00 ` [COFF] " Dennis Boone
2023-02-03 16:01 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
2023-02-03 16:25   ` Will Senn
2023-02-04  7:59 ` Ralph Corderoy
     [not found] <167544017712.2485736.11108085155717490044@minnie.tuhs.org>
2023-02-03 16:21 ` [COFF] Re: converting lousy scans of pdfs into something more, useable Will Senn
2023-02-03 17:09 [COFF] Re: converting lousy scans of pdfs into something more useable Bakul Shah

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