How to call pypdfocr functions to use them in a python script?

Question

Recently I downloaded pypdfocr, however, in the documentation there are no examples of how to call pypdfocr as a library, could anybody help me to call it just to convert a single file?. I just found a terminal command:

$ pypdfocr filename.pdf

Answer 1

If you're looking for the source code, it's normally under the directory site-package of your python installation. What's more, if you're using a IDE (i.e. Pycharm), it would help you find the directory and file. This is extremly useful to find class as well and show you how you can instantiate it, for example : https://github.com/virantha/pypdfocr/blob/master/pypdfocr/pypdfocr.py this file has a pypdfocr class type you can re-use and, possibly, do what a command-line would do.

In that class, the developper has put a lot of argument to be parsed :

def get_options(self, argv):
    """
        Parse the command-line options and set the following object properties:
        :param argv: usually just sys.argv[1:]
        :returns: Nothing
        :ivar debug: Enable logging debug statements
        :ivar verbose: Enable verbose logging
        :ivar enable_filing: Whether to enable post-OCR filing of PDFs
        :ivar pdf_filename: Filename for single conversion mode
        :ivar watch_dir: Directory to watch for files to convert
        :ivar config: Dict of the config file
        :ivar watch: Whether folder watching mode is turned on
        :ivar enable_evernote: Enable filing to evernote
    """
    p = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = "Convert scanned PDFs into their OCR equivalent.  Depends on GhostScript and Tesseract-OCR being installed.",
            epilog = "PyPDFOCR version %s (Copyright 2013 Virantha Ekanayake)" % __version__,
            )

    p.add_argument('-d', '--debug', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='debug', help='Turn on debugging')

    p.add_argument('-v', '--verbose', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='verbose', help='Turn on verbose mode')

    p.add_argument('-m', '--mail', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='mail', help='Send email after conversion')

    p.add_argument('-l', '--lang',
        default='eng', dest='lang', help='Language(default eng)')


    p.add_argument('--preprocess', action='store_true',
            default=False, dest='preprocess', help='Enable preprocessing.  Not really useful now with improved Tesseract 3.04+')

    p.add_argument('--skip-preprocess', action='store_true',
            default=False, dest='skip_preprocess', help='DEPRECATED: always skips now.')

    #---------
    # Single or watch mode
    #--------
    single_or_watch_group = p.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True)
    # Positional argument for single file conversion
    single_or_watch_group.add_argument("pdf_filename", nargs="?", help="Scanned pdf file to OCR")
    # Watch directory for watch mode
    single_or_watch_group.add_argument('-w', '--watch', 
         dest='watch_dir', help='Watch given directory and run ocr automatically until terminated')

    #-----------
    # Filing options
    #----------
    filing_group = p.add_argument_group(title="Filing optinos")
    filing_group.add_argument('-f', '--file', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='enable_filing', help='Enable filing of converted PDFs')
    #filing_group.add_argument('-c', '--config', type = argparse.FileType('r'),
    filing_group.add_argument('-c', '--config', type = lambda x: open_file_with_timeout(p,x),
         dest='configfile', help='Configuration file for defaults and PDF filing')
    filing_group.add_argument('-e', '--evernote', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='enable_evernote', help='Enable filing to Evernote')
    filing_group.add_argument('-n', action='store_true',
        default=False, dest='match_using_filename', help='Use filename to match if contents did not match anything, before filing to default folder')


    # Add flow option to single mode extract_images,preprocess,ocr,write

    args = p.parse_args(argv)

You can use any of those argument to be passed to it's parser, like this :

import pypdfocr

obj = pypdfocr.pypdfocr.pypdfocr()
obj.get_options([]) # this makes it takes default, but you could add CLI option to it.  Other option might be [-v] or [-d,-v]

I hope this help you understand in the mean time :)