OCRmyPDF VS OCRmyPDF

As mentioned in the other replies, Google's OCR is limited. OCRmyPDF is designed for PDFs. So if you download a 1000+ page public-domain dictionary off of Archive.org (which is something I do regularly), and you want to re-run the OCR because Internet Archive doesn't tune its OCR very well for multilingual works (if it all), then OCRmyPDF is going to beat Google's automatic OCR every time.

However, I recently paid a programmer to fork OCRmyPDF to give it the option to use Google's OCR engine instead of Tesseract. That fork is here: https://github.com/ualiawan/OCRmyPDF. It's more fiddly than the regular OCRmyPDF, and it requires a Google Cloud Vision account (which charges some fraction of a cent for each page OCRed), but it works well, and in some cases may produce better results than OCRmyPDF, although you must be sure to specify the language of the document.

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