How to add OCR to PDF with OCRMyPDF

PDF files created by scanning pages or by printing or exporting from other file formats may not have a text layer. Without a text layer, every page is just an image on which you will not be able to search or highlight. The OCRMyPDF tool can be used to add an OCR text layer to any PDF easily.

• Installing is easy:

$ sudo apt install ocrmypdf

• Usage is straightforward:

$ ocrmypdf in.pdf out.pdf

I noticed that adding an OCR text layer increased the PDF file size by 1.5x! The tool also mentions at the end that this file size increase is surprising.

• Some other options I like to use with this tool: --deskew --clean-final --rotate-pages

Tried with: OCRMyPDF 6.1.2 and Ubuntu 20.04