OCR Scanned PDF

Add text recognition to image-only PDFs using ocrmypdf. This preprocesses scanned documents to make them readable by text-extraction tools.

When to use

• Scanned PDF has no text layer (image-only)
• Before running pdf-to-markdown on a scanned document
• User explicitly requests OCR on a specific file

Inputs to gather

• PDF file path (required)
• Language code: --lang (optional; defaults to eng)
• Output path: --out (optional; defaults to <stem>-ocr.pdf next to source)

Procedure