34.6k stars · MPL-2.0 · v17.10.0 (2026-08-05) per ungh.cc/repos/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF/releases/latest · Track this in Scout
It adds an invisible text layer to a scanned PDF so it can be searched, without changing how the document looks.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A command-line program that drives the Tesseract text-recognition engine and rebuilds the PDF around its output. It can also straighten crooked pages, clean up the image, and write the result as PDF/A, the archive format that libraries use.
What it is good for. Any pile of scanned paper: invoices, contracts, receipts, old manuals, a decade of statements. The test is simple — open one and press the find key. If nothing is found, this is what you are missing. It is also the right tool for anyone who has been avoiding a full document-management system: you do not have to adopt one. Run the command over a folder, keep your folders exactly as they are, and every file becomes searchable by the tools you already use.
- It never touches the picture you see, so the output is the same document, with a hidden text layer added. There is nothing to lose by trying it.
- Mozilla Public License 2.0, which is permissive in practice: you may use it commercially, and the conditions apply only to the project's own files if you change them.
- It installs from ordinary package managers on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and macOS, so there is no building from source.
- It needs Tesseract and Ghostscript installed beside it. The package managers handle that; a manual install does not.
- Recognition quality is Tesseract's, not this project's. A clean 300-dpi scan reads almost perfectly; a photograph of a page taken at an angle in poor light does not.
- Each language you want must be installed separately as its own data package, and that catches people out with Russian and other non-Latin alphabets.
paperless-ngx/paperless-ngxIt uses this project inside itself and adds a whole archive with tags, search and a web page; it is the version for people who want to stop managing folders.
Track this in Scout- tesseract-ocr/tesseract
It is the engine that actually recognises the letters, and on its own it gives you text, not a PDF that still looks like the original.
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Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDFIt also works on PDFs and includes text recognition among many other operations, through a web page rather than a command, and its licence is no longer plainly open source.
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# Debian or Ubuntu sudo apt install ocrmypdf tesseract-ocr-rus # add a language pack as needed ocrmypdf --language eng+rus scan.pdf searchable.pdf # macOS brew install ocrmypdf # or with Python, in its own environment python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install ocrmypdf
