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Searching through a bulk of pdf files (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 months ago by Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I have a pile of part lists for tools I'm maintaining, in pdf format; and I'm looking for a good way to take a part number, search through the collection of pdfs, and output which files contain that number. Essentially letting me match random unknown part numbers to a tool in our fleet.

I'm pretty sure the majority of them are actual text you can select and copy+paste, so searching those shouldn't be too difficult; but I do know there's at least a couple in there that are just a string of jpgs packed in a pdf file. They will probably need OCR, but tbh I can probably live with skipping over those altogether.

I've been thinking of spinning up an instance of paperless-ngx and stuffing them all in there so I can let it index the contents including using OCR, then use it's search feature; but that also seems a tad overkill.

I'm wondering if you fine folks have any better ideas. What do you think?

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[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

For the OCR process you can probably wrangle up a simple bash pipeline with ocrmypdf and just let it run in the background once until all your PDFs have a text layer.

With that tool it should be doable with something like a simple while loop:

find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -print0 |
    while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
        echo "Processing $file ..."
        ocrmypdf "$file" "$file"
        # ocrmypdf "$file" "${file%.pdf}_ocr.pdf"   # if you want a new file instead of overwriting the old
    done

If you need additional languages or other options you'll have to delve a little deeper into the ocrmypdf documentation but this should be enough duct tape to just whip up a full OCR cycle.

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

That's a neat little tool that seems to work pretty well. Turns out the files I thought I'd need it for already have embedded OCR data, so I didn't end up needing it. Definitely one I'll keep in mind for the future though.