This program will help manage your scanned PDFs by doing the following:
- Take a scanned PDF file and run OCR on it (using the Tesseract OCR software from Google), generating a searchable PDF
- Optionally, watch a folder for incoming scanned PDFs and automatically run OCR on them
- Optionally, file the scanned PDFs into directories based on simple keyword matching that you specify
- Evernote auto-upload and filing based on keyword search
- Email status when it files your PDF
More links:
pypdfocr filename.pdf
--> filename_ocr.pdf will be generated
pypdfocr -w watch_directory
--> Every time a pdf file is added to `watch_directory` it will be OCR'ed
To automatically move the OCR'ed pdf to a directory based on a keyword, use the -f option and specify a configuration file (described below):
pypdfocr filename.pdf -f -c config.yaml
You can also do this in folder monitoring mode:
pypdfocr -w watch_directory -f -c config.yaml
The config.yaml file above is a simple folder to keyword matching text file. It determines where your OCR'ed PDFs (and optionally, the original scanned PDF) are placed after processing. An example is given below:
target_folder: "docs/filed"
default_folder: "docs/filed/manual_sort"
original_move_folder: "docs/originals"
folders:
finances:
- american express
- chase card
- internal revenue service
travel:
- boarding pass
- airlines
- expedia
- orbitz
receipts:
- receipt
The target_folder is the root of your filing cabinet. Any PDF moving will happen in
sub-directories under this directory.
The folders section defines your filing directories and the keywords associated with them.
In this example, we have three filing directories (finances, travl, receipts), and some
associated keywords for each filing directory. For example, if your OCR'ed PDF
contains the phrase "american express" (in any upper/lower case), it will be filed into
docs/filed/finances
The default_folder is where the OCR'ed PDF is moved to if there is no keyword match.
The original_move_folder is optional (you can comment it out with # in
front of that line), but if specified, the original scanned PDF is moved into
this directory after OCR is done. Otherwise, if this field is not present or
commented out, your original PDF will stay where it was found.
If there is any naming conflict during filing, the program will add an underscore followed by a number to each filename, in order to avoid overwriting files that may already be present.
To enable Evernote support, you will need to get a developer token for your Evernote account.. You should note that this script will never delete or modify existing notes in your account, and limits itself to creating new Notebooks and Notes. Once you get that token, you copy and paste it into your configuration file as shown below
To automatically upload the OCR'ed pdf to a folder based on a keyword, use the
-e option instead of the -f auto filing option.
pypdfocr filename.pdf -e -c config.yaml
Similarly, you can also do this in folder monitoring mode:
pypdfocr -w watch_directory -e -c config.yaml
The config file shown above only needs to change slightly. The folders section
is completely unchanged, but note that target_folder is the name of your
"Notebook stack" in Evernote, and the default_folder should just be the
default Evernote upload notebook name.
target_folder: "evernote_stack"
default_folder: "default"
original_move_folder: "docs/originals"
evernote_developer_token: "YOUR_TOKEN"
folders:
finances:
- american express
- chase card
- internal revenue service
travel:
- boarding pass
- airlines
- expedia
- orbitz
receipts:
- receipt
You can have PyPDFOCR email you everytime it converts a file and files it. You
need to first specify the following lines in the configuration file and then use the
-m option when invoking pypdfocr:
mail_smtp_server: "smtp.gmail.com:587"
mail_smtp_login: "[email protected]"
mail_smtp_password: "PASSWORD"
mail_from_addr: "[email protected]"
mail_to_list:
- "[email protected]"
- "[email protected]"
At the moment, the only options allowed for Tesseract and Ghostscript are specifying their executable locations manually. Use the following in your configuration file:
tesseract:
binary: "/usr/bin/tesseract"
ghostscript:
binary: "/usr/local/bin/gs"
PyPDFOCR is available in PyPI, so you can just run:
pip install pypdfocr
For those on Windows, because it's such a pain to get all the PIL and PDF dependencies installed, I've gone ahead and made an executable called pypdfocr.exe
You still need to install Tesseract and GhostScript as detailed below in the external dependencies list.
Clone the source directly from github (you need to have git installed):
git clone https://github.com/virantha/pypdfocr.git
Then, install the following third-party python libraries:
- PIL (Python Imaging Library) http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
- ReportLab (PDF generation library) http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/
- Watchdog (Cross-platform fhlesystem events monitoring) https://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog
- PyPDF2 (Pure python pdf library)
These can all be installed via pip:
pip install pil
pip install reportlab
pip install watchdog
pip install pypdf2
You will also need to install the external dependencies listed below.
PyPDFOCR relies on the following (free) programs being installed and in the path:
- Tesseract OCR software https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
- GhostScript http://www.ghostscript.com/
On Mac OS X, you can install these using homebrew:
brew install tesseract
brew install ghostscript
On Windows, please use the installers provided on their download pages.
** Important ** Tesseract version 3.02.02 or newer required (apparently 3.02.01-6 and possibly others do not work due to a hocr output format change that I'm not planning to address).
While test coverage is at 90% right now, Sphinx docs generation is at an early stage. The software is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.