ocr-shot.sh

#!/bin/bash

set -e

CONTENTS=$(tesseract -c language_model_penalty_non_dict_word=0.8 --tessdata-dir /usr/local/share/tessdata/ "$1" stdout -l eng | xml esc)

hex=$((cat <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<string>$CONTENTS</string>
</plist>
EOF
) | plutil -convert binary1 - -o - | xxd -p | tr -d '\n')

xattr -w -x com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment "$hex" "$1"
mdimport "$1"

@sclarke shouldn't be any downsides, only larger indexes (but not too daunting).

For @amake tip you have to brew install imagemagick. And if you need other languages than englisch, you need to install brew install --with-all-languages tesseract and change the -l argument on tesseract. For example if you want to recognize english and german use l eng+deu.

any plan to support ocr pdf files?

This script is very helpful - thank you for sharing it.

I'm running macos 10.13.6 and needed to modify ocr-shot.sh to specify

--tessdata-dir /usr/local/share/tessdata/
vs
--tessdata-dir /usr/local/share/

ocr-shot.sh is now working as designed.

two notes:

• I'm getting

"Warning: Invalid resolution 0 dpi. Using 70 instead."

macos-native and Firefox screenshots are 72 dpi. I'll look into where I can set that explicitly.

• I presumed ocr-shot.sh's file meta additions would 1) change files' modified timestamp and 2) appear in either Finder or Preview Get Info views. Neither is the case. Adding the extracted text to files' Comments or Annotations could be useful.

why cannot Automator run the workflow, asserting "line 4 tesseract command not found"?