scantailor-advanced VS OCRmyPDF

There's also https://scantailor.org/ (and a maintained fork at https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced ) which semi-automates unwarping and other corrective tasks in scanned books.

ScanTailor Advanced (downloads are in the sidebar, labeled as "Releases") is a little more complex. It takes a folder of images and performs a series of steps to produce good book scans, though it might be useful for your purpose as well. The first step after importing images is to split them up, and ScanTailor does this by looking for straight lines that might indicate a gap between pages. Now, I don't know if this will handle any more than two pictures per image, but it will at least handle doubles. ScanTailor will also attempt to automatically deskew pictures, and then there are a few steps that you'll need to take to make your pictures come out nicely.

My preferred method is to take pictures of all the pages of the book (Open Camera has a nice option to take a new picture every n seconds), optionally touch them up with ScanTailor (automated), and then turn all the images to a PDF using NAPS2 (which will OCR the text as it goes in).

Next is the cleanup. Scan Tailor is the best game in town for this, but it's a dead project. Instead, there are two forks that have picked up where the original developers left off. Scan Tailor Advanced is my current fork of choice, though Scan Tailor Universal tries to add new usability features. For whatever reason, only Advanced makes full use of my CPU, so it's several times faster than Universal for the time being.

No problem. https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced/releases

If you are interested in more ways to treat a scan, ScanTailor is definitely an option. I am using a fork called ScanTailor Advanced which is available under GPL-3.0 on GitHub. With this tool you can also crop your images and apply options like threshold or posterization to improve readability while further reducing the file size.

I use a £15 arm with a vice grip for my phone from Amazon, copy the files to my laptop and then run a bash for-loop of the tesseract CLI over the resultant files.

I use https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced to deskew the images and generate the PDF.

It isn't perfect but my purposes are more around research than publication, so, YMMV!

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