[COFF] converting lousy scans of pdfs into something more useable

[Bakul Shah]

On Feb 3, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> what's your experience with using sad pdfs? Do you just live with them as they are, or do you try to fix them and how, or do you use a workflow and get good results?

Usually I just live with them but I may use "ocrmypdf" if search
or copy-paste is unsatisfactory.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

It's a python script that runs most any unix and uses
tesseract. Its author's motivation seems similar to yours:

I searched the web for a free command line tool to OCR PDF files: I found many, but none of them were really satisfying:
    • Either they produced PDF files with misplaced text under the image (making copy/paste impossible)
    • Or they did not handle accents and multilingual characters
    • Or they changed the resolution of the embedded images
    • Or they generated ridiculously large PDF files
    • Or they crashed when trying to OCR
    • Or they did not produce valid PDF files
    • On top of that none of them produced PDF/A files (format dedicated for long time storage)
...so I decided to develop my own tool.

I rarely print PDFs any more.