OCRmyPDF

Package

Self-hosted CLI that adds a searchable OCR text layer to scanned PDFs

Price: Free, open source
Access: None, runs locally

Docs
Repo

About

OCRmyPDF runs Tesseract on scanned PDFs on your own machine and writes a searchable PDF/A with the text placed under each page image, so it can be searched and copied. It deskews and rotates pages, optimizes images and uses all CPU cores. CLI, Python API and Docker images.

What you can do with it

Make scanned PDFs searchable and copyable without sending them to a cloud API
Batch-convert an archive of scans into PDF/A for long-term storage
Deskew and rotate crooked scanned pages while adding the OCR text

Get started

Install it, e.g. apt install ocrmypdf or brew install ocrmypdf
Run ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf

Example

ocrmypdf -l eng --rotate-pages --deskew input_scanned.pdf output_searchable.pdf

Details

Hosting: Self-hosted, Runs locally
Available in: Worldwide
Official SDKs: Python
MCP server: None