PDF Ocr

OCR scanned / image-only pages (pdf-ocr)

OCR scanned / image-only pages

Part of the Universal PDF Management & Creation Skill Repository. Category: PDF Management. Every skill is individually callable (INDIVIDUAL MODE) and may also be invoked automatically by the orchestrator (SYSTEM MODE).

When to use

Only pages with no usable text layer are OCR'd; pages with text are skipped.

Operations

• detect when OCR needed
• make scanned pages searchable
• page-level recognition
• language selection
• skip already-text pages
• graceful degradation when no OCR engine

Engine (what actually executes this)

universal_pdf/core.ocr:detect_ocr_need / make_searchable / ocr_page_text

All heavy lifting is done on disk / one page at a time by the shared engine — never by loading the document into an LLM context.

Tools & graceful degradation

• Preferred tool: ocrmypdf (add searchable layer)
• Fallback: pytesseract+tesseract / easyocr (page text)

If the preferred backend is unavailable the skill transparently uses the fallback or reports a documented limitation. It never reports success when an operation did not actually happen.

Validation (this skill attaches checks to its Outcome)

OCR completeness; output openable

Related skills

pdf-read, pdf-vision, pdf-render, pdf-inspect

Example requests it handles

• "OCR this scanned book so I can search it."
• "Make this image-only PDF selectable text."

Notes

Provenance: outputs cite their source page/section where relevant.