How to use OC Rmy PDF: what you can do with it

3 use cases

• Make your scanned PDFs searchable

  Install OC Rmy PDF and add a hidden text layer to scans so you can search and copy text.

  • REPO ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor
  • Life admin
  • Beginner
  View prompt

  Install ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF and run it on every PDF in <folder> with `--output-type pdfa` and `--deskew`, writing results to <output folder>. Skip files that already have text and report the size before and after.

  Share Email me this

• OCR documents in French, Chinese or mixed languages

  Install Tesseract language packs and tell OC Rmy PDF which languages to look for.

  • REPO ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor
  • Life admin
  • Beginner
  View prompt

  Using ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF, install the Tesseract language packs for <languages> and OCR <files> with `-l <codes>`. Then search each output for <word> to confirm the text layer is correct.

  Share Email me this

• OCR a whole archive in place, safely

  Process thousands of pages across all CPU cores, updating files only when OCR succeeds.

  • REPO ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor
  • Life admin
  • Intermediate
  View prompt

  Write a script that runs ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF in place on every PDF under <archive folder>, logs successes and failures to a CSV, and never overwrites a file when OCR fails. Run it on a small test folder first and show me the log.

  Share Email me this

Quick start with OC Rmy PDF

1. Check you have what it needs: Linux, Windows (or WSL), macOS or FreeBSD, or the Docker image; Ghostscript and Tesseract OCR installed; Tesseract language packs for non-English documents.
2. Open ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF on GitHub and read the README and license.
3. Install it, for example apt install ocrmypdf on Debian or Ubuntu, or brew install ocrmypdf on macOS
4. Add an OCR layer with ocrmypdf --output-type pdfa input.pdf output.pdf
5. Straighten crooked scans with ocrmypdf --deskew input.pdf output.pdf
6. Turn a photo into a one page PDF with ocrmypdf input.jpg output.pdf

These steps come from our top use case, Make your scanned PDFs searchable, which also has a copy-paste agent prompt.

Using the Deduped MCP, get the setup steps for ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

claude mcp add --transport http deduped https://dedupedai.com/mcp

Best AI repos for Life admin

About this repo

• Who it is forAnyone with scanned paperwork, books or archives who wants searchable PDFs without sending files to a cloud service.
• Why it is hot35k stars, talked about in 2 AI sources we track
• LanguagePython
• Sourcegithub.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF · Back to Hot repos

Requirements

• Linux, Windows (or WSL), macOS or FreeBSD, or the Docker image
• Ghostscript and Tesseract OCR installed
• Tesseract language packs for non-English documents

Related repos

• Trended earlier REPO datalab-to/indra Indra Indra OCR is a CPU-based OCR tool that turns PDFs and images into markdown, text, or JSON with boxes, layout blocks, and reading order.
• Trended earlier REPO baidu/Unlimited-OCR Unlimited OCR Unlimited OCR 2 is Baidu's open OCR model for ultra-long document parsing. Sparse Reference Sliding Window Attention lets it parse documents of any length within a finite context window, with multi-page inference that uses cross-page context. It runs with Hugging Face Transformers for quick tests and a customized SGLang server for serving, and has a Hugging Face Spaces demo.
• Trended earlier REPO KrushnaVardhanReddy/PaperPilot Paper Pilot PaperPilot is a PDF and document toolkit written in pure Rust that runs locally, so files never leave your machine. The same engine works as an MCP server for coding agents, a CLI, a browser tool, a desktop app and a local REST API. It can merge, split, rotate, compress, OCR, watermark and extract text and tables from PDFs.