Automatic OCR with Hazel: The Easy Way

I have previously written about how to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on a PDF using Hazel and… a complicated pile of Python scripts and other software. Since I wrote that post, several of those pieces of software have been updated, and the core component has been, apparently, entirely abandoned.
Recently, while I was waiting for yet another keyboard replacement on my MacBook, I took another look at the OCR thing and found that there’s a much easier way available: OCRmyPDF.
It’s easy to install, assuming you’ve already got brew: brew install ocrmypdf
From there, it’s just a single action in Hazel. “Run embedded shell script: ocrmypdf $1”
Admittedly, you can use some of their many settings to get something a bit nicer than just OCR; personally, I’m using --rotate-pages --deskew --mask-barcodes – the first two to help with variations in the input because I sometimes use a bed scanner, and the latter to help Tesseract, which can have issues with barcodes..
I’ve also paired it with a couple additional actions, just to keep everything organized:

I also took the time to stop using Dropbox as the go-between for my scanner and the Mac running Hazel; I’d forgotten that the scanner has a USB port. Plug in a cheap flash drive, and it’s available as a (very slow) file server. Mount the drive, add it as a Login Item so it’ll auto-mount on boot, and you can set Hazel automations to run right there. I’m not OCRing them there, though — like I said, it’s a very slow server, so it tags them ‘for OCR’ and moves them to my desktop.1

With iCloud Drive handling my desktop, I’ve found it to be a pretty great ‘intake’ folder for all of my Hazel automations. It’s quite nice to be able to save a PDF from my phone, add a tag, and watch it disappear again as it’s auto-sorted, or throw a PDF on my desktop with a tag and see it pop in and out as the OCR runs. ↩