Contributing guidelines

Contributions are welcome!

Big changes

Please open a new issue to discuss or propose a major change. Not only is it fun to discuss big ideas, but we might save each other’s time too. Perhaps some of the work you’re contemplating is already half-done in a development branch.

Code style

We use PEP8, black for code formatting and isort for import sorting. The settings for programs are in pyproject.toml and setup.cfg.

Tests

New features should come with tests that confirm their correctness.

New Python dependencies

If you are proposing a change that will require a new Python dependency, we prefer dependencies that are already packaged by Debian or Red Hat. This makes life much easier for our downstream package maintainers.

Python dependencies must also be GPLv3 compatible.

New non-Python dependencies

OCRmyPDF uses several external programs (Tesseract, Ghostscript and others) for its functionality. In general we prefer to avoid adding new external programs.