You might find Docsplit useful: Docsplit is a command-line utility and Ruby library for splitting apart documents into their component parts: searchable UTF-8 plain text, page images or thumbnails in any format, PDFs, single pages, and document metadata (title, author, number of pages…)
This answer is for anyone encountering pdfs with images and needing to use OCR. I could not find a workable off-the-shelf solution; nothing that gave me the accuracy I needed. Here are the steps I found to work. Use pdfimages from https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ to turn the pages of the pdf into images. Use Tesseract to detect … Read more
This answer is for anyone encountering pdfs with images and needing to use OCR. I could not find a workable off-the-shelf solution; nothing that gave me the accuracy I needed. Here are the steps I found to work. Use pdfimages from https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ to turn the pages of the pdf into images. Use Tesseract to detect … Read more
After many fruitful hours of exploring OCR libraries, bounding boxes and clustering algorithms – I found a solution so simple it makes you want to cry! I hope you are using Linux; pdftotext -layout NAME_OF_PDF.pdf AMAZING!! Now you have a nice text file with all the information lined up in nice columns, now it is … Read more