OCRmyPDF

Install OCRmyPDF and Tesseract to create searchable PDFs from scanned documents.

ansible-playbook -i inventory -K playbooks/lab-stack.yml --tags ocr

🔧 Manual setup and configuration

  • Log out and log back in after running the role so Nautilus/Nemo reload user actions.
  • In Nautilus, right-click a PDF and use OCR PDF (ocrmypdf).
  • The action runs ~/.local/bin/ocrmypdf-wrapper and writes *_ocr.pdf next to the original file.
  • The wrapper defaults to German + English OCR (-l deu+eng) and skips pages that already contain text.
  • Review ~/.cache/ocrmypdf-wrapper.log if conversion fails.

✅ Check

ocrmypdf --version
tesseract --version

Expected: both commands print a version.

echo "test" > /tmp/ocr-test.txt
enscript /tmp/ocr-test.txt -o - | ps2pdf - /tmp/ocr-test.pdf
ocrmypdf -l eng /tmp/ocr-test.pdf /tmp/ocr-test_ocr.pdf
pdfinfo /tmp/ocr-test_ocr.pdf | sed -n '1,5p'

Expected: /tmp/ocr-test_ocr.pdf is created successfully.

ls -l ~/.local/share/file-manager/actions/ocrmypdf.desktop
ls -l ~/.local/share/nemo/actions/ocrmypdf.nemo_action

Expected: at least one action file exists (depending on your file manager).

Nautilus right-click action behavior

  • Menu entry: OCR PDF (ocrmypdf)
  • File type: appears for PDF files (application/pdf)
  • Execution: calls ~/.local/bin/ocrmypdf-wrapper "%f"
  • Output naming: input paper.pdf becomes paper_ocr.pdf
  • Batch behavior: the wrapper accepts multiple files and processes each one in sequence
  • Troubleshooting: if the menu entry does not appear, restart Nautilus (nautilus -q) or relogin