This has been asked before, but I don't really know if the answers help me. Here is my problem: I got a bunch of (10,000 or so) pdf files. Some were text files that were saved using adobe's print feature (so their text is perfect and I don't want to risk screwing them up). And some were scanned images (so they don't have any text and I will have to settle for OCR). The files are in the same directory and I can't tell which is which. Ultimately I want to turn them into .txt files and then do string processing on them. So I want the most accurate OCR possible.
It seems like people have recommended:
Also I am a n00b to programming so if it's going to take like weeks to learn how to do something, I would rather pay the $$$. Thx for input/experiences.
BTW, I'm running Linux Mint 11 64 bit and/or windows 7 64 bit.
Here are the other threads:
Batch OCRing PDFs that haven't already been OCR'd
Open source OCR
PDF Text Extraction Approach Using OCR
https://superuser.com/questions/107678/batch-ocr-for-many-pdf-files-not-already-ocred
When the batch screen appears, click the "OCR" option and then click "Choose file". Now, select as many PDF files as possible and add them to the program. It is easier when you organize the PDF files in a folder so that you can upload them at once.
Simply select Document>OCR Text Recognition>OCR Multiple Files. If you have Acrobat 9 and you just want to OCR a bunch of files, this is probably all you need! Acrobat X can do OCR as part of an Action, so you can combine OCR with other operations as part of a document processing workflow.
Just to put some of your misconceptions straight...
" I don't have a licensed copy of acrobat so I don't know how I'd convert 10,000 files to tiff."
You can convert PDFs to TIFF with the help of Free (as in liberty) and free (as in beer) Ghostscript. Your choice if you want to do it on Linux Mint or on Windows 7. The commandline for Linux is:
gs \
-o input.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
input.pdf
"i don't want 10,000 30 page documents turned into 30,000 individual tiff images"
You can have "multipage" TIFFs easily. Above command does create such TIFFs of the G4 (fax tiff) flavor. Should you even want single-page TIFFs instead, you can modify the command:
gs \
-o input_page_%03d.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
input.pdf
The %03d
part of the output filename will automatically translate into a series of 001
, 002
, 003
etc.
Caveats:
tiffg4
output device is 204x196 dpi. You probably want a better value. To get 720 dpi you should add -r720x720
to the commandline. -gXxY
to set widthxheight in device points. So to get ISO A4 output page dimensions in landscape you can add a -g8420x5950
parameter.So the full command which controls these two parameters, to produce 720 dpi output on A4 in portrait orientation, would read:
gs \
-o input.tif \
-sDEVICE=tiffg4 \
-r720x720 \
-g5950x8420 \
input.pdf
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