it'd be nice if this could produce text-overlaid PDFs about doc2text

[jlsutherland]

Definitely. I think it would relatively straightforward to integrate. Would suggest building the text insertion into the Page class and then put a export_to_pdf() method on the Document class.

[jlsutherland]

Would you be interested in contributing @jbothma ?

[jbothma]

Yup - would love to. Won't get to it before next week but will start a PR when I can :)

It's part of the ocr command as an optional output format so not sure what the right place would be to integrate it with doc2text.

[jlsutherland]

Awesome, thank you!

The method's location in the code would be conditional on the way tesseract embeds that data. Does tesseract insert the data into a PDF, or it in a separate state that contains the text and placement information?

In the first case, we would need the method you mentioned that produces a nicely optimized pdf from the images first, then the embedding second. We need this method regardless, I think. In the second case, we could run the tesseract embed method at any time after we produce the fixed image crop.

Thoughts?

[jbothma]

So this is basically what I was talking about.

• doc2text's existing functionality to straighten and flatten and normalise would run first,
• product a multipage tif or whatever,
• then give to tesseract to OCR with pdf config file (for pdf output).

wget http://mfma.treasury.gov.za/MFMA/Urban%20Development%20Zones/Gazette%20No.%2026866.pdf
gs -dNOPAUSE -q -r500 -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -dBATCH -sOutputFile=test.tif  Gazette\ No.\ 26866.pdf
tesseract test.tif outbase pdf

produces https://www.scribd.com/document/324084564/Out-Base

[jbothma]

Tesseract produces the PDF already, so you'd select that as the output format of the OCR step. There's no intermediate hOCR or anything.