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JavaScript OCR and text extraction for images and PDFs.

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Scribe.js

Scribe.js is a JavaScript library that performs OCR and extracts text from images and PDFs.

Common use cases:

  1. Recognize text from images.
  2. Extract text from user-uploaded .pdf files.
    1. If the .pdf file is already text-native, scribe.js can extract the existing text.
    2. If the .pdf file is image-native, scribe.js can recognize text using OCR.
  3. Write .pdf files that include a high-quality invisible text layer.
    1. scribe.js can insert text into an existing .pdf file, making it searchable.

Scribe.js is a library intended for developers. End users who want to scan documents should see the officially-supported GUI at scribeocr.com (repo here).

Setup

Install from npm by running the following:

npm i scribe.js-ocr

Scribe.js is written in JavaScript using ESM, so can be imported directly from browser or Node.js JavaScript code without a build step.

// Import statement in browser:
import scribe from 'node_modules/scribe.js-ocr/scribe.js';
// Import statement for Node.js:
import scribe from 'scribe.js-ocr';

// Basic usage
scribe.extractText(['https://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/img/eng_bw.png'])
	.then((res) => console.log(res))

When using Scribe.js in the browser, all files must be served from the same origin as the file importing Scribe.js. This means that importing Scribe.js from a CDN will not work. There is no UMD version.

Templates

The following are template repos showing how Scribe.js can be used within various frameworks/build systems.

Contributions are appreciated--if you are using Scribe.js within a framework not listed below, consider making a basic repo and adding to this list with a PR, especially if non-obvious steps were required.

Scribe.js vs. Tesseract.js

Considering whether Scribe.js or Tesseract.js is better for your project? Read this article.

Documentation

Projects and Examples

The following are examples and projects built using Scribe.js. Additional examples can be found in the examples directory.

If you have a project or example repo that uses Scribe.js, feel free to add it to this list using a pull request. Examples submitted should be well documented such that new users can run them; projects should be functional and actively maintained.

Contributing

To work on a local copy, simply clone with --recurse-submodules and install. Please run the automated tests before making a PR.

## Clone the repo, including recursively cloning submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:scribeocr/scribe.js.git
cd scribe.js

## Install dependencies
npm i

## Make changes
## [...]

## Run automated tests before making PR
npm run test