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How do I OCR documents already in my Paperless library? - Knowledgebase / Paperless for Mac OS / OCR - Mariner Software

How do I OCR documents already in my Paperless library?

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How do I OCR documents already in my Paperless library?


Unless instructed not to, Paperless will perform Optical Character Recognition OCR on library items as they are imported to a Paperless library.

OCR can be performed on documents and receipts already in Paperless with the Recognize Text command. Recognize Text will perform OCR on:

  • Single-page library items.

  • The first page of multipage library items.

And return OCR results to the OCR Text metadata field.

Please note that the OCR Text fields is not visible by default. In order to view the OCR Text field, do the following:

  • Choose Show Library Configuration from the View menu.

  • Click the Document Type you want to edit

  • Drag the OCR Text field from the Fields list into the Display Fields list

  • Click the Donebutton

After doing this, you should see the OCR Text field in the item details, where you will be able to see the text that has been recognized in the item. Note that you can edit this OCR Text field to make corrections to the recognized text.

There are two ways to run the Recognize Text command in Paperless:

  • Choose Recognize Text from the Edit menu.

  • Click the Recognize Text toolbar item. Recognize Text is not part of the default Paperless 2 toolbar; to add it to the toolbar, you will need to customize the toolbar.

To show OCR results, you will need to assign the OCR Text field to the document type you would like to see it show for. For steps to do this, see  this Knowledge Base article.

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