Command line software to batch convert TIFF to indexable PDF

Question

I need a utility to batch convert TIFF files to indexable PDF's. The software needs to run on linux and must work from the command line. The software does not need to be open source. I've tried the conversion using tesseract and hocr2pdf however they produce PDF's with garbled text (Note: the text is only garbled if you "select all" text in the PDF). I've found other utilities but they only run under Windows or don't work from the command line. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

After trying several tools (including Abbyy) I decided on: Vividata. They have decent pricing, run under Linux, and don't have a page per year limit.

Answer 2

Mogrify should be able to help you:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/mogrify

Answer 3

This is exactlyu what you are looking for:

http://ocr4linux.com/en:start

Command line OCR tool for Linux based on best on the market OCR from ABBYY. (Disclaimer: I work for ABBYY)

Answer 4

This answer is oblique and only partial. Disregard if it does not apply to you.

There may exist such software, but I am not familiar with it. If your need is strong enough that you will write 2000 lines of code or so to meet it, then there is the Linux-oriented Libpoppler, which gives you the interface to write a program to make its own, custom PDF, exactly the way you want it. Unfortunately, Libpoppler though valuable is not particularly pleasant to code to; and, unfortunately, if you do code to it, then you will probably find yourself reading long tracts of the PDF standard.

If you do write such software, you might consider publishing it as open source.

Good luck.

Answer 5

I wrote a bash script that uses Tesseract 3 or Abbyy OCR 11. It can batch convert or run in directory monitor mode.

In your case

pmocr.sh --batch --target=PDF /path/to/tiff/files

See the script here: https://github.com/deajan/pmOCR