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How to oCR documents in French, Chinese or mixed languages with OC Rmy PDF

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

Short answer: List available packs with apt-cache search tesseract-ocr on Debian or Ubuntu; then install one, for example apt-get install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim, or brew install tesseract-lang on macOS; run a single language with ocrmypdf -l fra LeParisien.pdf LeParisien.pdf. All steps.

  • Life admin
  • Beginner
  • 20 minutes
  • From the README
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor

Who it is forA family historian or immigrant scanning records in two languages.

The problemWithout the right language pack, accents and non-Latin scripts come out as gibberish.

The outcomeSearchable PDFs with correct accented and non-English text, including bilingual documents.

What you need first

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

Steps

  1. List available packs with apt-cache search tesseract-ocr on Debian or Ubuntu
  2. Install one, for example apt-get install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim, or brew install tesseract-lang on macOS
  3. Run a single language with ocrmypdf -l fra LeParisien.pdf LeParisien.pdf
  4. Run mixed documents with ocrmypdf -l eng+fra Bilingual-English-French.pdf Bilingual-English-French.pdf

Prompt for your agent

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.

Caveat. Language codes are ISO 639-3, so look up your language's code before running.

Use this in your AI agent

Ask your agent

Using the Deduped MCP, get the setup steps for ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF and "OCR documents in French, Chinese or mixed languages"

Add Deduped to Claude Code once

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

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