PDF processingBeginner
Scanned PDF OCR and Literature Organisation
Turn scanned PDFs, old papers and archival materials into searchable, copyable and manageable literature files.
OCRmyPDFZotero
30 min – 2 hours 5 stepsView workflow
Open-source command-line tool that adds a searchable OCR text layer to scanned PDFs.
OCRmyPDF is an open-source command-line tool that adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDFs so they can be searched, copied and archived long term. It is often used with Tesseract OCR and suits batch processing of scanned literature, archives and lab records.
Use cases: OCR for scanned PDFs, batch literature processing, archive digitisation, making PDFs searchable
Recommended combination: OCRmyPDF + Tesseract OCR
Turn scanned PDFs, old papers and archival materials into searchable, copyable and manageable literature files.
Organise scanned PDFs, downloaded papers and old materials into a Zotero library, and use OCR and a tagging system to improve search, reading and writing efficiency.