OCRmyPDF VS pdfplumber

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

- [pdfplumber](https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber)

I recently published a story that was based on some data analysis I did of a report I obtained from the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services in VA. I wanted to share a quick walkthrough of how I extracted the data from tables in a PDF using a Python module called PDFplumber. I also uploaded a video to Youtube if you prefer that.

I've been working with pdfplumber, which is built atop pdfminer.six. It allows one to break the page up into sections and extract text from them in turn, which may help keep columns separated better.

You could try pdfplumber

I'm not sure if there is a way to reliably detect bold characters: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/issues/724

pdfplumber is also pretty good. It can help segment text a bit better than pdfminer can alone.

To handle machine generated one, a possible package is pdfplumber.