ocrmymail VS OCRmyPDF

OCRmyMail is an SMTP server relay that adds an OCR text layer to PDF mail attachments and sends them to the original recipient. OCRmyPDF is used to do the heavy lifting a.k.a perform the OCR.

Stars: 19899 Author: ocrmypdf Star the OCRmyPDF repository⭐

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this tool yet, but I’ve found great accuracy and flexibility with [OCRmyPDF](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF). It (usually) detects and fixes page rotation, and works quite well on slanted text or A | B pages in regards to copying and formatting. I believe it uses tesseract in the background, but using it is very simple and it has the just works factor.

and the good old sci-hub.

For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient.

Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs:

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier.

Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.

While I'm a fan of Tika a lot of people get queasy from Java and XML, they might be better served by their preferred scripting language and https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF, which has the same OCR engine.

I’ve been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text to PDFs books I reference a lot (1). My scans are quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.

I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.

1: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., “ Using different Page Segmentation Modes”

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.