How to Automatically OCR PDF Files in a Given Folder?

[NeoDevin]

Can anyone recommend a method to have all pdf files in a given folder automatically OCR?

My scanner saves files as pdf, but I would like them to be searchable.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ChrisJA]

It would help to know what operating system you are using. Mac OS X or Linux?

Adobe Acrobat will do what you want.

 

[NeoDevin]

I have computers running windows and linux, a method for either would be fine, preferably a free option.

 

[Routaran]

There's several OCR options available to you to use. I did a Google Search for 'linux ocr pdf' and this was the first hit on the list
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1456756

you can write a small script with a for loop that will go through the contents of a directory and ocr all the pdf files if the program doesn't have flags that allow you to do multiple pdfs at the same time.

 

[ChrisJA]

Sorry, I +thought+ I had relied to this days ago. It seems the way to go is "tesseract" http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
It has it's own GUI but there are other 3rd party GUIs or you can run it from the command line or script