OCRmyPDF VS pyHanko

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

If you mean signing as in "adding a digital, cryptographic signature", you could use pyhanko () which provides everything state-of-the-art to do just that.

Document read from codimd-api https://github.com/hackmdio/hackmd-cli/blob/master/README.md - Matching config.yaml + styles read from git - Fetching data from CRM https://docs.espocrm.com/development/api/#client-implementations - Parsing markdown as jinja template - Generate pdf from markdown https://github.com/jmaupetit/md2pdf - Add signature fields https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/pyHanko - store pdf file (maybe seafile?) (or nextcloud)

I don't think Okular supports PKCS#11 out of the box, but if you're OK with CLI tooling, this might suit your needs: https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/pyHanko (full disclosure: I wrote that tool, so assume I'm biased).

Shameless plug: I'm the author of this tool: https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/pyHanko/.

Certomancer started out as a weekend-long hacking session because I wanted to put the test suite for pyHanko on more solid foundations. I more or less knew where I wanted to go: I started by crafting a configuration file describing a somewhat involved testing configuration, and then implemented features incrementally until the tool was capable of handling the sample config I initially put together. This is the result.

If you aren't afraid of some command-line tooling, you can use pyHanko: https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/pyHanko/. It's mainly a signing tool, but the library behind it supports literally every encryption scheme in the PDF standard. The CLI is a bit more restricted, but it'll probably still do the job in this particular case.