Alfresco Simple OCR Action

This addon provides an action to extract OCR text from images or plain PDFs in Alfresco.

License The plugin is licensed under the LGPL v3.0.

State Current addon release is 2.3.1

Compatibility The current version has been developed using Alfresco 5.2 and Alfresco SDK 3.0.2, although it should also run in Alfresco 5.1, 5.0 & 4.2 (as it is developed by using Alfresco SDK 3.0)

Browser compatibility: 100% supported

Supported OCR software:

• pdfsandwich
• OCRmyPDF
• Windows.Media.OCR as local service (we are not providing this software, you have to build it by yourself)

Languages Currently Share action interface is provided in English and the behaviour internface in English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Italian. OCR supported languages catalog depends directly on selected OCR software (Tesseract OCR or Windows.Media.OCR)

No original Alfresco resources have been overwritten

BeeCon 2016

This addon was presented a BeeCon 2016. You can find additionals details at Integrating a simple OCR in Alfresco

Downloading the ready-to-deploy-plugin

The binary distribution is made of two jar files to be deployed in Alfresco as modules:

• repo JAR
• share JAR

You can install them by putting the jar files in module folder:

• Copy repo JAR to /opt/alfresco/modules/platform (create the directory if it does not exist)
• Copy share JAR to /opt/alfresco/modules/share

Re-start Alfresco after copying the files.

Building the artifacts

If you are new to Alfresco and the Alfresco Maven SDK, you should start by reading Jeff Potts' tutorial on the subject.

You can build the artifacts from source code using maven $ mvn clean package

Installation

OCR software for Linux depends on programs like gs or ImageMagick, which are also dependencies for Alfresco. In order to avoid problems, it's recommended to install Alfresco from scratch, letting the OS the installation of the packages.

You can find detailed instructions to perform Alfresco installation from scratch at Alfresco Documentation.

If you are using Linux and your Alfresco is installed by using default wizards, you must pay attention to environment execution for programs launched inside your JVM and you must adjust versions and path precedence.

You can find more options to solve this problem at the FAQ page.

Configuration

After installation, following properties must be included in alfresco-global.properties

• If you are using pdfsandwich

ocr.command=/usr/bin/pdfsandwich
ocr.output.verbose=true
ocr.output.file.prefix.command=-o

ocr.extra.commands=-verbose -lang spa+eng+fra
ocr.server.os=linux

• If you are using OCRmyPDF

ocr.command=/usr/local/bin/ocrmypdf
ocr.output.verbose=true
ocr.output.file.prefix.command=

ocr.extra.commands=--verbose 1 --force-ocr -l spa+eng+fra
ocr.server.os=linux

• If you are using Windows.OCR

ocr.url=http://localhost:60064/api/OCR/
ocr.output.verbose=true

ocr.extra.commands=Spanish
ocr.server.os=windows

Usage of rule

• Including a rule on a folder by selecting Extract OCR action
• Every dropped image on this folder will be sent to OCR software in order to produce a searchable PDF file.
• To perform this operation asynchronously, just use the check provided by Alfresco to configure the rule.
• To allow Alfresco operating in case of OCR error, set the rule check Continue on error

Usage of action

• Press the action OCR in document browser or document details
• The action will be executed in asynchronous mode, so the result will be available after a time

Known issues

• When using WebDAV to upload documents, only asynchronous rule execution is allowed