OCRmyPDF VS normcap

Try https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF - it uses Tesseract behind the scenes and it absolutely brilliant.

I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

If by "like a photocopy" you mean the file contains images of text rather than text, the MacOS viewer presumably does OCR on the images. I don't know if there's a Linux document viewer with that capability built-in, but a quick search turned up the standalone tool OCRmyPDF.

For anyone interested I solved the problem by first ocr files through the free and open source software ocrmypdf avaible here

ocrmypdf is nice for stuff like that.

Use imagemagick to convert them to PDF and ocrmypdf to straighten and OCR. See this explanation.

Fair enough, maybe this might work for you, it should seperate the text from image anyway and if you have Adobe acrobat it should be able delete the background too with the edit function. It may already be able to do that if you haven't tried it

The workflow feels a bit more polished (Though also not perfect) and the repo is still active.

[1] https://github.com/dynobo/normcap

https://github.com/dynobo/normcap#similar-open-source-tools

Some sort of OCR — NormCap bound to a hotkey for general OCR and obisidian-ocr-plugin for Obsidian. Vital for tracking down screenshots of stuff.

Just for completeness: There's normcap, an OCR tool to copy text from the screen. It works right out of the box from what I tested, both from Flatpak and the AUR.

but i just found this https://github.com/dynobo/normcap from their readme, using tesseract as its backend, looks like nice replacement for text extractor.