Using the OCRmyPDF API¶
OCRmyPDF originated as a command line program and continues to have this legacy, but parts of it can be imported and used in other Python applications.
Some applications may want to consider running ocrmypdf from a subprocess call anyway, as this provides isolation of its activities.
Example¶
OCRmyPDF one high-level function to run its main engine from an application. The parameters are symmetric to the command line arguments and largely have the same functions.
import ocrmypdf
if __name__ == '__main__': # To ensure correct behavior on Windows and macOS
ocrmypdf.ocr('input.pdf', 'output.pdf', deskew=True)
With a few exceptions, all of the command line arguments are available and may be passed as equivalent keywords.
A few differences are that verbose
and quiet
are not available.
Instead, output should be managed by configuring logging.
Parent process requirements¶
The ocrmypdf.ocr()
function runs OCRmyPDF similar to command line
execution. To do this, it will:
- create a monitoring thread
- create worker processes (on Linux, forking itself; on Windows and macOS, by spawning)
- manage the signal flags of its worker processes
- execute other subprocesses (forking and executing other programs)
The Python process that calls ocrmypdf.ocr()
must be sufficiently
privileged to perform these actions.
There is no currently no option to manage how jobs are scheduled other
than the argument jobs=
which will limit the number of worker
processes.
Creating a child process to call ocrmypdf.ocr()
is suggested. That
way your application will survive and remain interactive even if
OCRmyPDF fails for any reason.
Programs that call ocrmypdf.ocr()
should also install a SIGBUS signal
handler (except on Windows), to raise an exception if access to a memory
mapped file fails. OCRmyPDF may use memory mapping.
ocrmypdf.ocr()
will take a threading lock to prevent multiple runs of itself
in the same Python interpreter process. This is not thread-safe, because of how
OCRmyPDF’s plugins and Python’s library import system work. If you need to parallelize
OCRmyPDF, use processes.
Warning
On Windows and macOS, the script that calls ocrmypdf.ocr()
must be
protected by an “ifmain” guard (if __name__ == '__main__'
). If you do
not take at least one of these steps, process semantics will prevent
OCRmyPDF from working correctly.
Logging¶
OCRmyPDF will log under loggers named ocrmypdf
. In addition, it
imports pdfminer
and PIL
, both of which post log messages under
those logging namespaces.
You can configure the logging as desired for your application or call
ocrmypdf.configure_logging()
to configure logging the same way
OCRmyPDF itself does. The command line parameters such as --quiet
and --verbose
have no equivalents in the API; you must use the
provided configuration function or do configuration in a way that suits
your use case.
Progress monitoring¶
OCRmyPDF uses the tqdm
package to implement its progress bars.
ocrmypdf.configure_logging()
will set up logging output to
sys.stderr
in a way that is compatible with the display of the
progress bar. Use ocrmypdf.ocr(...progress_bar=False)
to disable
the progress bar.
Exceptions¶
OCRmyPDF may throw standard Python exceptions, ocrmypdf.exceptions.*
exceptions, some exceptions related to multiprocessing, and
KeyboardInterrupt
. The parent process should provide an exception
handler. OCRmyPDF will clean up its temporary files and worker processes
automatically when an exception occurs.
Programs that call OCRmyPDF should consider trapping KeyboardInterrupt so that they allow OCR to terminate with the whole program terminating.
When OCRmyPDF succeeds conditionally, it returns an integer exit code.