Working with PDFs adds some extra steps, which you can skip if you are working with images by themselves. OCR can be performed on both PDFs (which contain, and are sometimes rendered as, images) and standalone images. Step 1 – Installing Ghostscript, Tesseract, and PDFtk This tutorial will provide installation instructions for a Ubuntu 22.04 server, following our guide to Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 22.04. These tools are available on most platforms. You will also review other tools that can be used instead of or in addition to this baseline functionality. This tutorial will cover setting up an OCR pipeline using Ghostscript, Tesseract, and PDFtk. This is especially useful if you are ingesting documents or images to a web application that needs to extract text, or if you are working with a large corpus of documents that need to have their full text indexed. In this case, you can use a pipeline of open source tools to automatically perform OCR.

However, you may still encounter documents or images that contain significant amounts of non-embedded text which cannot be automatically extracted.

Many modern desktop and mobile applications and scanner software stacks have some OCR functionality built in, and most circulating PDFs have text embedded. Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is primarily used to turn the text from scanned images into selectable, copyable, encoded, embedded text.

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