Image to Text
The script uses Tesseract to get text from pdfs. It reads pdfs from a specified directory and outputs text files to another directory. Tesseract works well for documents with simple structure and fonts that are easily parsed but generally struggles with more complex layout. To fix errors in the recovered text, you may want to use Edit Distance Based Search and Replace, exploiting the fact that errors in OCR tend of systematic.
Rather than use Tesseract, you can also use Abbyy FineReader or Captricity. And to estimate the error rate of OCR, you may want to use recognize.
For a general overview of how to convert paper to digitial and how to optimize that process, see A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital
Usage
pdf2txt.py [options] pdf_directory
Command Line Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-d DPI, --dpi=DPI JPEG Resolution in DPI (default: 400)
-j JPGDIR, --jpgdir=JPGDIR
JPEG output directory (default: jpg)
-t TXTDIR, --textdir=TXTDIR
Text output directory (default: text)
-r, --resume Resume OCR to Text (default: False)
Example:
python pdf2txt.py pdf_dir
The script will be post process all PDF files in pdf_dir directory and save the output text files to the text directory
License
Scripts are released under the MIT License.