gImageReader VS OCRmyPDF

On tesseract base here is a software to make a scan a text searchable pdf. It take a bit of time and can be a bit tedious but it does the work! https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader/releases It does not work well on cursive writing of course. It's a bit less heavy code sided solution. Good luck!

I'm working with old newspaper PDFs to convert them into DOC formats. I'm having a great time with gImageReader by highlighting columns and converting them to plain text. Then I take that plain text into Libreoffice Writer (7.0.4.2) to clean up and save. If this were a book as opposed to a newspaper with ads and columns, it would have bee a lot easier to convert and format.

It would help to know a bit more of your usecase. If you're looking to just extract the text (ie, take all the textual content of your PDF and drop it into a separate text document), there are solutions like ABBYY Finereader and gImageReader. If you're looking to make PDFs searchable (keeping the scanned pages, but adding a text layer underneath so you can search and copy from them), there's NAPS2 (which has an additional command line tool for automation) and OCRmyPDF.

OpenSource OCR... for desktop users I like "gImageReader" URL: https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader (Technically is GUI for tessaract)

gImageReader is the linux standard that I'm aware of. It's a GUI to Tessaeract, but IIRC you can use other models if you have them.

gImageReader as a simple OCR application

https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader ^^ seems like it has installers for different OS's

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