OCRmyPDF vs Tesseract OCR

OCRmyPDF is free software that adds searchable text to scanned PDF files while retaining the original PDF as much as possible. It uses Tesseract to recognize text in page images and produces PDF/A-2b by default, with regular PDF output available as an alternative. Image-processing options such as deskew can adjust pages to support visual quality and OCR accuracy. When a PDF already contains text, its processing modes can stop with an error, skip affected pages, redo OCR, or force OCR across all pages. OCRmyPDF can also be used as a Python library, and plugins can customize processing steps. Installation methods are documented for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Docker; Paperless-ngx and Nextcloud OCR are named as third-party integrations. Results may be poor for low-quality scans or languages not specified for processing, and handwriting is not recognized. The project also notes that accuracy may trail commercial solutions. Its documentation advises processing only PDFs users trust and warns that its example Docker web service has no security measures and is not meant for public internet deployment.

Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source engine that extracts printed text from images. It can be run from the command line or used through an API; the project does not include a graphical application. It recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box and supports Unicode UTF-8. Version 4 introduced an LSTM neural-network engine for line recognition while retaining the legacy character-pattern engine. Input formats include PNG, JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, GIF, WebP, BMP, and PNM. Output formats include plain text, hOCR, PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE. Tesseract cannot read PDF files directly, although PDF is available as an output format; the documentation suggests converting files or using OCRmyPDF. The project documents wrappers for several languages, including Python, Java, Swift, Flutter, Ruby, Rust, and Go, as well as C and C++ APIs. The repository code uses Apache License 2.0, though dependencies may have different licenses. Image quality may need improvement for better recognition results.