What this program does

This is a Linux console (terminal) application.

This Docker image is a text mode console application that will, through menus, allow you to "fix" broken PDF files. By broken, I mean files that may have quality issues (but are valid PDFs). For instance, the file may need the pages rotated, pages split into two pages (I.E. two pages of a book scanned into one page of a PDF), first and/or last pages removed from the PDF, pages "de-skewed" (I.E. text is at an angle that isn't a proper 90 degrees), and may need OCR (optical character recognition, to allow copy/highlighting/search) added.

This is intended to be used on scanned images of printed text. Using it on anything else may give surprising and/or incorrect output.

It also has some basic redaction capability, where it will convert, if requested, the document to images and back to PDF, and remove many PDF tags from the output file. This is not industrial-grade redaction, but should help increase the chance that a PDF only contains what you want it to contain.

This docker image has many dependencies, see the format-scan-pdf.py file which lists them. Normal users will not need to concern themselves with these dependencies, as they will be part of the image.

Upgrading Docker Image

docker pull jmaslak/format-scan-pdf

Executing

Something along the lines of, without installing anything from this repo:

docker run -it --user $(id -u):$(id -g) -v ~/pdf:/usr/pdf jmaslak/format-scan-pdf in.pdf out.pdf

This will download the image from Docker Hub.

The ~/pdf directory must already exist (you can name it something else, but whatever it is called, it needs to be passed to the Docker run command and it will be shared with the Docker image. Files read and written will be read and written as your user ID and primary group ID. This directory will be where your input and output files are written.

If you want to use the standard ~/pdf directory, you can use the format-scan-pdf.sh script to execute Docker. Just pass it the filenames (relative to the ~/pdf directory) of the input and output PDF filenames. It will download the Docker Hub image as needed.

Prerequisites

You will need Docker installed and working, and your user able to start Docker images. Normally, this requires your user in the docker group.

Building

The build.sh will create a local docker image based on the included Dockerfile.

Note that the format-pdf-scan.sh script will reference jmaslak/format-pdf-scan.sh and thus probably shouldn't be used for local development!