> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://til.yulrizka.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://til.yulrizka.com/unix/convert-pdf-to-text-using-ocr.md).

# convert pdf to text using ocr

make sure you have imagemagick and tesseract are installed

```
$ sudo apt install imagemagick tesseract-ocr
```

It's a 2 step process:

1. Convert PDF to .tiff using `convert` from imagemagick

   ```
   $ convert -density 300 input.pdf -depth 8 output.tiff
   ```
2. convert .tiff to text using `tesseract`

   generate `out.txt`

   ```
   $  tesseract output.tiff out
   ```