OCR and Document Text Extraction

OCR and Document Text Extraction

Extract readable text from PDFs, scanned images, and Word documents using Python libraries available in most environments. No cloud API required.

When to Use

• User wants to read text from a PDF file
• User wants to extract text from a scanned image or photo of a document
• User wants to read a .docx Word document programmatically
• User wants to convert a multi-page document to plain text for analysis
• User wants to extract specific pages or sections from a PDF

How to Use

1. Extract text from a PDF (pymupdf — fastest)

import fitz  # pip install pymupdf

doc  = fitz.open("document.pdf")
text = "\n\n".join(page.get_text() for page in doc)
print(text[:2000])  # preview first 2000 chars
doc.close()

2. Extract text from a PDF (pdf-parse via Node.js)

// requires: npm install pdf-parse (already in DevOS dependencies)
const pdfParse = require('pdf-parse')
const fs       = require('fs')
const data     = await pdfParse(fs.readFileSync('document.pdf'))
console.log(data.text.slice(0, 2000))
console.log(`Pages: ${data.numpages}`)

3. OCR a scanned image (Tesseract)

Requires Tesseract installed: winget install UB-Mannheim.TesseractOCR