What it will do?

You scanned documents but can not search them for text?

This script is for you.

What it does...

• search a directory for PDFs
• read every PDF
  • try to extract text from the PDF
  • create a new PDF containing the original content AND the text that was recognized

The script does the same for TIFFs.
If your scan stretches over several TIFFs e.g.

• a-scan-1.tiff
• a-scan-2.tiff
• ...

no problem

• The script will concatenate the TIFFs for you and
• Create one single PDF

The script was tested for Debian 10 (buster).

Preparation

apt-get install imagemagick tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-deu

See the orc.sh for troubleshooting.

Run

./ocr.sh

This will grab all TIFFs and then all PDFs.

Be aware that at the moment the OCR uses DEU (German) as dictionary. Change the script to use another language.