Installation

OCRmyPDF requires Python 3.5 (or newer) and Tesseract 3.04 (or newer).

Installing on Debian and Ubuntu 16.10 or newer

Users of Debian 9 (“stretch”) or later or Ubuntu 16.10 or later may simply

apt-get install ocrmypdf

Installing on macOS

A Homebrew tap is available for macOS:

brew tap jbarlow83/ocrmypdf
brew install ocrmypdf

Warning

Users who previously installed OCRmyPDF on macOS using pip install ocrmypdf should remove the pip version (pip3 uninstall ocrmypdf) before switching to the Homebrew version.

Installing the Docker image

For many users, installing the Docker image will be easier than installing all of OCRmyPDF’s dependencies. For Windows, it is the only option.

If you have Docker installed on your system, you can install a Docker image of the latest release.

Follow the Docker installation instructions for your platform. If you can run this command successfully, your system is ready to download and execute the image:

docker run hello-world

OCRmyPDF will use all available CPU cores. By default, the VirtualBox machine instance on Windows and macOS has only a single CPU core enabled. Use the VirtualBox Manager to determine the name of your Docker engine host, and then follow these optional steps to enable multiple CPUs:

# Optional step for Mac OS X users
docker-machine stop "yourVM"
VBoxManage modifyvm "yourVM" --cpus 2  # or whatever number of core is desired
docker-machine start "yourVM"
eval $(docker-machine env "yourVM")

Assuming you have a Docker engine running, you can download one of the three available images:

Image name Download command Notes
ocrmypdf docker pull jbarlow83/ocrmypdf Latest ocrmypdf with Tesseract 3.04. Includes English, French, German, Spanish.
ocrmypdf-polyglot docker pull jbarlow83/ocrmypdf-polyglot As above, with all available language packs.
ocrmypdf-tess4 docker pull jbarlow83/ocrmypdf-tess4 Latest ocrmypdf with Tesseract 4.00.00alpha and English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Arabic and Russian (the top 8).

For example:

docker pull jbarlow83/ocrmypdf-tess4

Then tag it to give a more convenient name, just ocrmypdf:

docker tag jbarlow83/ocrmypdf-tess4 ocrmypdf

The alternative “polyglot” image provides all available language packs.

You can then run ocrmypdf using the command:

docker run --rm ocrmypdf --help

To execute the OCRmyPDF on a local file, you must provide a writable volume to the Docker image, and both the input and output file must be inside the writable volume. This example command uses the current working directory as the writable volume:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/home/docker" <other docker arguments>   ocrmypdf <your arguments to ocrmypdf>

In this worked example, the current working directory contains an input file called test.pdf and the output will go to output.pdf:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/home/docker"   ocrmypdf --skip-text test.pdf output.pdf

Note

The working directory should be a writable local volume or Docker may not have permission to access it.

Note that ocrmypdf has its own separate -v VERBOSITYLEVEL argument to control debug verbosity. All Docker arguments should before the ocrmypdf image name and all arguments to ocrmypdf should be listed after.

For convenience, a shell alias can hide the docker command:

alias ocrmypdf='docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/home/docker" ocrmypdf'
ocrmypdf --version  # runs docker version

Or in the wonderful fish shell:

alias ocrmypdf 'docker run --rm -v (pwd):/home/docker ocrmypdf'
funcsave ocrmypdf

Manual installation on macOS

These instructions probably work on all macOS supported by Homebrew.

If it’s not already present, install Homebrew.

Update Homebrew:

brew update

Install or upgrade the required Homebrew packages, if any are missing:

brew install libpng openjpeg jbig2dec libtiff     # image libraries
brew install qpdf
brew install ghostscript
brew install python3
brew install libxml2 libffi leptonica
brew install unpaper   # optional

Python 3.5 and 3.6 are supported.

Install the required Tesseract OCR engine with the language packs you plan to use:

brew install tesseract                       # Option 1: for English, French, German, Spanish
brew install tesseract --with-all-languages  # Option 2: for all language packs

Update the homebrew pip and install Pillow:

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install --upgrade pillow

You can then install OCRmyPDF from PyPI:

pip3 install ocrmypdf

The command line program should now be available:

ocrmypdf --help

Installing on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

No package is currently available for Ubuntu 16.04, but you can install the dependencies manually:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
    unpaper \
    ghostscript \
    tesseract-ocr \
    qpdf \
    python3-pip \
    python3-cffi

If you wish install OCRmyPDF to the system Python, then install as follows (note this installs new packages into your system Python, which could interfere with other programs):

sudo pip3 install ocrmypdf

If you wish to install OCRmyPDF to a virtual environment to isolate the system Python, you can follow these steps.

python3 -m venv venv-ocrmypdf
source venv-ocrmypdf/bin/activate
pip3 install ocrmypdf

Installing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Installing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty) is more difficult than some other options, because of bugs in Python package installation and because OCRmyPDF depends on some packages newer than are available in the main distribution.

Add new “apt” repositories needed for backports of Ghostscript 9.16, libav-11 (for unpaper 6.1) and Tesseract 4.00 (alpha). This will replace Ghostscript and Tesseract 3.x on your system. If you prefer to not modify your system in this matter, consider using a Docker container.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vshn/ghostscript -y
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:heyarje/libav-11 -y
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alex-p/tesseract-ocr

Update apt-get:

sudo apt-get update

Install system dependencies:

sudo apt-get install \
    software-properties-common python-software-properties \
    zlib1g-dev \
    libjpeg-dev \
    libffi-dev \
    libavformat56 libavcodec56 libavutil54 \
    ghostscript \
    qpdf \
    python3-pip \
    python3-pil \
    python3-pytest \
    python3-reportlab \
    python3-wheel \
    python3-venv \
    tesseract-ocr \
    tesseract-ocr-eng

If you wish install OCRmyPDF to the system Python, then install as follows (note this installs new packages into your system Python, which could interfere with other programs):

sudo pip3 install ocrmypdf

If you wish to install OCRmyPDF to a virtual environment to isolate the system Python, you can follow these steps. This includes a workaround for a known, unresolved issue in Ubuntu 14.04’s ensurepip package:

sudo apt-get install python3-venv
python3 -m venv venv-ocrmypdf --without-pip
source venv-ocrmypdf/bin/activate
wget -O - -o /dev/null https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python
deactivate
python3 -m venv --system-site-packages venv-ocrmypdf
source venv-ocrmypdf/bin/activate
pip install ocrmypdf

These installation instructions omit the optional dependency unpaper, which is only available at version 0.4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04. The author could not find a backport of unpaper, and created a .deb package to do the job of installing unpaper 6.1 (for x86 64-bit only):

wget -q 'https://www.dropbox.com/s/vaq0kbwi6e6au80/unpaper_6.1-1.deb?raw=1' -O unpaper_6.1-1.deb
sudo dpkg -i unpaper_6.1-1.deb

Installing on ArchLinux

The author is aware of an ArchLinux package for ocrmypdf. It seems like the following command might work.

pacman -S ocrmypdf

Installing on Windows

Direct installation on Windows is not possible. Install the Docker container as described above. Ensure that your command prompt can run the docker “hello world” container.

Running on Windows

The command line syntax to run ocrmypdf from a command prompt will resemble:

docker run -v /c/Users/sampleuser:/home/docker ocrmypdf --skip-text test.pdf output.pdf

where /c/Users/sampleuser is a Unix representation of the Windows path C:\Users\sampleuser, assuming a user named “sampleuser” is running ocrmypdf on a file in their home directory, and the files “test.pdf” and “output.pdf” are in the sampleuser folder. The Windows user must have read and write permissions.

Bash on Ubuntu on Windows should also be a viable route for running the OCRmyPDF Docker container.

Installing HEAD revision from sources

If you have git and Python 3.5 or newer installed, you can install from source. When the pip installer runs, it will alert you if dependencies are missing.

To install the HEAD revision from sources in the current Python 3 environment:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

Or, to install in development mode, allowing customization of OCRmyPDF, use the -e flag:

pip3 install -e git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

On certain Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, you may need to use run the install command as superuser:

sudo pip3 install [-e] git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

Note that this will alter your system’s Python distribution. If you prefer to not install as superuser, you can install the package in a Python virtual environment:

git clone -b master https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git
python3 -m venv
source venv/bin/activate
cd OCRmyPDF
pip3 install .

However, ocrmypdf will only be accessible on the system PATH after you activate the virtual environment.

To run the program:

ocrmypdf --help

If not yet installed, the script will notify you about dependencies that need to be installed. The script requires specific versions of the dependencies. Older version than the ones mentioned in the release notes are likely not to be compatible to OCRmyPDF.