Linux, OCR and PDF: Scan to PDF/A

Friday, March 29th, 2013 | Author:

The (by far) most visited post on this blog is from 2010, about OCRing a PDF in GNU/Linux (Optical Character Recognition), and it contains a small shell script that has been improved by others several times. After having bought a new flatbed scanner, I re-investigated how to scan and OCR pdfs, how to produce DJVU files that are incredibly small and how to get metadata right. It turns out what I really ever wanted was to create PDF/A compliant documents (I just didn't know what PDF/A was before). But let me explain the details after presenting you the quick solution. At the end, I have a shell script that scans directly to PDF/A.

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Category: English, Not Mathematics | 20 Comments

Linux, OCR and PDF – problem solved

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 | Author:

Imagine you've scanned some book into a PDF file on Linux, such that every pdf-page contains two book-pages and there is a lot of additional white-space and maybe the page orientation is wrong. And, worst of all, there is no full-text search, thus no full-text indexing for desktop search engines. I consider this problem solved on Linux!
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Category: English | 43 Comments