OCRmyPDF — The Complete Guide: Making a Scanned Archive of Reports and Standards Searchable
OCRmyPDF is a command-line tool that runs optical character recognition (OCR) on a scanned PDF and places the recognised text beneath the image. The page looks exactly the same, but now you can search and copy from it — ideal for an archive of old geotechnical reports, standards and project files.
OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF project
Adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs — old reports, standards and drawings become searchable.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Invisible text layer — search and copy without changing the look.
- PDF/A — a format suited to long-term archiving.
- Deskew and rotate — fixes crooked or upside-down pages.
- Image compression — smaller files.
- Parallel processing — uses all CPU cores for large batches.
What to know
It is built on the Tesseract engine and supports more than 100 languages. There is no graphical interface, and on Windows you must install Tesseract and Ghostscript first. Licensed under MPL-2.0 — free for any use.
Related tools
The engine itself — Tesseract OCR. For scanning straight to searchable PDF — NAPS2. For a graphical OCR front end — gImageReader.
Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR project
The open OCR engine behind many tools — turns scans into text in more than 100 languages.
Get it from the vendor
NAPS2
Ben Olden-Cooligan
Scan documents straight to searchable PDF with built-in OCR — delivery notes, minutes and marked-up drawings from site.
Get it from the vendor
gImageReader
gImageReader project
Graphical OCR built on Tesseract — turn scanned pages and PDFs into text or a searchable PDF.
Get it from the vendor
PDF Arranger
PDF Arranger project
Merge, split, rotate, crop and reorder PDF pages by drag and drop — for assembling calc packages, submittals and drawing sets.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
One command on a folder, and a whole scanned archive becomes searchable. Well worth the quarter of an hour it takes to install.