566: Paperless Strikes Back

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54

Those looking at automating OCR should look at this Automators post - if you are willing to brew install ocrmypdf to use OCRmyPDF then it is a free OCR solution.


I’ve completed the Paperless Field Guide and have previously set up Hazel to use this script to OCR stuff that I drop into a particular folder. My paperless workflow is a lot simpler as the ‘capture’ phase can be quite simple (no fancy OCR app required) and the Hazel OCR rule just OCRs (and then compresses) any PDF it comes across. I get a small PDF with text included, ready for the next organisation step. Note that you will also need to brew install ghostscript to install ghostscript, used for PDF compression.

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As with any script, use with care, but this creates a new instance of the file (beware of losing tags, etc) first OCRing, then compressing the OCR version. Note that the rule ignores those temporary files. It also logs to an output.log file. This was useful during development, feel free to remove logging.

# Get elements of filename: path, filename, extension
a=$1
xpath=${a%/*} 
xbase=${a##*/}
xfext=${xbase##*.}
xpref=${xbase%.*}

# Output Filename for OCR my PDF
inputOcrFilename="$1"
outputOcrFilename="${xpath}/${xpref}_ocr.${xfext}"

# Process OCR my PDF
echo "Process OCR my PDF" > output.log
ocrmypdf "${inputOcrFilename}" "${outputOcrFilename}" --skip-text >> output.log

# Output filename for Compress PDF
inputCompressFilename="${outputOcrFilename}"
outputCompressFilename="${xpath}/${xpref}_ocr_compressed.${xfext}"

# Process Compress PDF
echo "Process Compress PDF" >> output.log
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4  -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="${outputCompressFilename}" "${inputCompressFilename}" >> output.log

# Delete Original File
echo "Delete Original File" >> output.log
rm "$1" >> output.log

# Delete OCR my PDF temp file
echo "Delete OCR my PDF temp file" >> output.log
rm "${outputOcrFilename}" >> output.log

# Move the new file to the Ready folder
echo "Move the new file to the Ready folder" >> output.log
readyFilename="${xpath}/PDF Prep Ready/${xpref}.${xfext}"
mv "${outputCompressFilename}" "${readyFilename}" >> output.log
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