v3

v3.2.1

Changes

Fixed #47 “convert() got and unexpected keyword argument ‘dpi’” by upgrading to img2pdf 0.2
Tweaked the Dockerfiles

New features

Lossless reconstruction: when possible, OCRmyPDF will inject text layers without otherwise manipulating the content and layout of a PDF page. For example, a PDF containing a mix of vector and raster content would see the vector content preserved. Images may still be transcoded during PDF/A conversion. (--deskew and --clean-final disable this mode, necessarily.)
New argument --tesseract-pagesegmode allows you to pass page segmentation arguments to Tesseract OCR. This helps for two column text and other situations that confuse Tesseract.
Added a new “polyglot” version of the Docker image, that generates Tesseract with all languages packs installed, for the polyglots among us. It is much larger.

Changes

JPEG transcoding quality is now 95 instead of the default 75. Bigger file sizes for less degradation.

Changes

Fixed bug that caused incorrect page size and DPI calculations on documents with mixed page sizes

Changes

Default output format is now PDF/A-2b instead of PDF/A-1b
Python 3.5 and macOS El Capitan are now supported platforms - no changes were needed to implement support
Improved some error messages related to missing input files
Fixed #20: uppercase .PDF extension not accepted
Fixed an issue where OCRmyPDF failed to text that certain pages contained previously OCR’ed text, such as OCR text produced by Tesseract 3.04
Inserts /Creator tag into PDFs so that errors can be traced back to this project
Added new option --pdf-renderer=auto, to let OCRmyPDF pick the best PDF renderer. Currently it always chooses the ‘hocrtransform’ renderer but that behavior may change.
Set up Travis CI automatic integration testing

New features

Easier installation with a Docker container or Python’s pip package manager
Eliminated many external dependencies, so it’s easier to setup
Now installs ocrmypdf to /usr/local/bin or equivalent for system-wide access and easier typing
Improved command line syntax and usage help (--help)
Tesseract 3.03+ PDF page rendering can be used instead for better positioning of recognized text (--pdf-renderer tesseract)
PDF metadata (title, author, keywords) are now transferred to the output PDF
PDF metadata can also be set from the command line (--title, etc.)
Automatic repairs malformed input PDFs if possible
Added test cases to confirm everything is working
Added option to skip extremely large pages that take too long to OCR and are often not OCRable (e.g. large scanned maps or diagrams); other pages are still processed (--skip-big)
Added option to kill Tesseract OCR process if it seems to be taking too long on a page, while still processing other pages (--tesseract-timeout)
Less common colorspaces (CMYK, palette) are now supported by conversion to RGB
Multiple images on the same PDF page are now supported

Changes

New, robust rewrite in Python 3.4+ with ruffus pipelines
Now uses Ghostscript 9.14’s improved color conversion model to preserve PDF colors
OCR text is now rendered in the PDF as invisible text. Previous versions of OCRmyPDF incorrectly rendered visible text with an image on top.
All “tasks” in the pipeline can be executed in parallel on any available CPUs, increasing performance
The -o DPI argument has been phased out, in favor of --oversample DPI, in case we need -o OUTPUTFILE in the future
Removed several dependencies, so it’s easier to install. We no longer use:
- GNU parallel
- ImageMagick
- Python 2.7
- Poppler
- MuPDF tools
- shell scripts
- Java and JHOVE
- libxml2
Some new external dependencies are required or optional, compared to v2.x:
- Ghostscript 9.14+
- qpdf 5.0.0+
- Unpaper 6.1 (optional)
- some automatically managed Python packages

Release candidates^

rc9:
- Fix #118: report error if ghostscript iccprofiles are missing
- fixed another issue related to #111: PDF rasterized to palette file
- add support image files with a palette
- don’t try to validate PDF file after an exception occurs
rc8:
- Fix #111: exception thrown if PDF is missing DocumentInfo dictionary
rc7:
- fix error when installing direct from pip, “no such file ‘requirements.txt’”
rc6:
- dropped libxml2 (Python lxml) since Python 3’s internal XML parser is sufficient
- set up Docker container
- fix Unicode errors if recognized text contains Unicode characters and system locale is not UTF-8
rc5:
- dropped Java and JHOVE in favour of qpdf
- improved command line error output
- additional tests and bug fixes
- tested on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
rc4:
- dropped MuPDF in favour of qpdf
- fixed some installer issues and errors in installation instructions
- improve performance: run Ghostscript with multithreaded rendering
- improve performance: use multiple cores by default
- bug fix: checking for wrong exception on process timeout
rc3: skipping version number intentionally to avoid confusion with Tesseract
rc2: first release for public testing to test-PyPI, Github
rc1: testing release process

./OCRmyPDF.sh script is still available for now
Stacking the verbosity option like -vvv is no longer supported
The configuration file config.sh has been removed. Instead, you can feed a file to the arguments for common settings:

ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf @settings.txt

where settings.txt contains one argument per line, for example:

-l
deu
--author
A. Merkel
--pdf-renderer
tesseract

Fixes

Notes and known issues

Some dependencies may work with lower versions than tested, so try overriding dependencies if they are “in the way” to see if they work.
--pdf-renderer tesseract will output files with an incorrect page size in Tesseract 3.03, due to a bug in Tesseract.
PDF files containing “inline images” are not supported and won’t be for the 3.0 release. Scanned images almost never contain inline images.