Why is there no selectable text in the PDF output file?

Eike Stepper

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Jan 26, 2020, 2:33:31 PM1/26/20

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I just installed Tesseract OCR for the first time and had some success with the following command:

C:\Users\FooBar\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR>tesseract img001.tif stdout -l deu

It correctly outputs the recognized German text to the console. Then I tried this command:

C:\Users\FooBar\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR>tesseract img001.tif img001 -l deu pdf

It creates a PDF file. I can open it with PDF-XChange and see the image.

But there's no selectable text. With Notepad++ I checked that it does not contain any German text.

Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers

/Eike

P.S.: I hope I didn't post this twice. My first attempt seems to have disappeared in limbo...

Eike Stepper

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Jan 27, 2020, 2:21:50 AM1/27/20

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I found out that my attempt to find the text in the PDF with Notepad was too naive.

Instead I installed the "A-PDF Text Extractor" tool and indeed I could extract all the recognized text from the PDF.

But the text is not selectable with the broadly used PDF viewer "PDF-XChange",

nor does Windows Search find any of the recognized words in the PDF.

So my question remains, am I doing something wrong?

Shree Devi Kumar

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Jan 27, 2020, 3:20:03 AM1/27/20

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Not all viewers work alike. Try with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or the viewer in Chrome.

When I last checked most readers/viewers will select and search text in tesseract generated pdfs. Many times the highlighting of selection is incorrect but if you copy and paste all recognized text should be there.

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Eike Stepper

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Jan 27, 2020, 11:03:14 AM1/27/20

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Thank you for the reply. I can confirm that the FoxIt PDF viewer allows me to select the recognized text.

Unfortunately I can't just change to a different viewer ;-(

PDF-XChange perfectly makes text selectable that was recognized and embedded by ABBYY FineReader.

Do you think the Tesseract OCR team would be interested in making Tesseract's PDF creation more flexible/compatible?

As a Java-only programmer I could only contribute to such an effort by providing example PDFs that were created

by ABBYY FineReader and perhaps by finding the structural differences between the two types of PDFs.

Thad Guidry

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Jan 27, 2020, 11:16:17 AM1/27/20

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Have you tried to use gImageReader (it uses Tesseract4) and the hOCR/PDF dropdown option and inspect the output panel ?

You can also highlight and select text on the image and then see what rows are affected in the output panel.

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

Eike Stepper

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Jan 27, 2020, 11:24:03 AM1/27/20

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Thank you, Thad. Do you think that gImageReader would work well on my Windows box? What would be the goal of this excercise?

Cheers

/Eike

Thad Guidry

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Jan 27, 2020, 11:50:48 AM1/27/20

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I use it all the time on my Windows 10 PC.

You can save the PDF created and compare to see if it works better.

If so, then might be a configuration issue.

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

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