OCRmyPDF

<!-- SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2014 Julien Pfefferkorn -->
<!-- SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2015 James R. Barlow -->
<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0 -->

<img src="docs/images/logo.svg" width="240" alt="OCRmyPDF">

[![Build Status](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF/actions/workflows/build.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF/actions/workflows/build.yml) [![PyPI version][pypi]](https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf/) ![Homebrew version][homebrew] ![ReadTheDocs][docs] ![Python versions][pyversions]

[pypi]: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/ocrmypdf.svg "PyPI version"
[homebrew]: https://img.shields.io/homebrew/v/ocrmypdf.svg "Homebrew version"
[docs]: https://readthedocs.org/projects/ocrmypdf/badge/?version=latest "RTD"
[pyversions]: https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/ocrmypdf "Supported Python versions"

OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted.

```bash
ocrmypdf                      # it's a scriptable command line program
   -l eng+fra                 # it supports multiple languages
   --rotate-pages             # it can fix pages that are misrotated
   --deskew                   # it can deskew crooked PDFs!
   --title "My PDF"           # it can change output metadata
   --jobs 4                   # it uses multiple cores by default
   --output-type pdfa         # it produces PDF/A by default
   input_scanned.pdf          # takes PDF input (or images)
   output_searchable.pdf      # produces validated PDF output
```

[See the release notes for details on the latest changes](https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes.html).

## Main features

- Generates a searchable [PDF/A](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=PDF/A) file from a regular PDF
- Places OCR text accurately below the image to ease copy / paste
- Keeps the exact resolution of the original embedded images
- When possible, inserts OCR information as a "lossless" operation without disrupting any other content
- Optimizes PDF images, often producing files smaller than the input file
- If requested, deskews and/or cleans the image before performing OCR
- Validates input and output files
- Distributes work across all available CPU cores
- Uses [Tesseract OCR](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract) engine to recognize more than [100 languages](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata)
- Keeps your private data private.
- Scales properly to handle files with thousands of pages.
- Battle-tested on millions of PDFs.

<img src="misc/screencast/demo.svg" alt="Demo of OCRmyPDF in a terminal session">

For details: please consult the [documentation](https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

## Motivation

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