pdfsandwich ☆

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Description:
Generate sandwich OCR PDFs from scanned file

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Productivity

Tags: ocr pdf scanning document-processing tesseract

Install: brew install pdfsandwich

About:
pdfsandwich is a command-line tool designed to add OCR text layers to scanned PDF documents. It acts as a user-friendly wrapper around powerful OCR engines like Tesseract and OCRopus, enabling full-text search and selection within scanned files. This utility is particularly valuable for digitizing archives and improving the accessibility of document collections.

Key Features:

Supports multiple OCR backends (Tesseract, OCRopus, Cuneiform)
Multi-language OCR capability
Automatic blank page detection and removal
Output compression to reduce file size

Use Cases:

Creating searchable text archives from scanned documents and books
Adding OCR layers to image-only PDFs for accessibility and text extraction
Processing large batches of scanned documents for digital libraries

Alternatives:

OCRmyPDF – A more modern and actively maintained Python-based tool with similar functionality and extensive features.
Adobe Acrobat Pro – A commercial GUI application with powerful OCR capabilities but requires a paid license.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 16, 2025 12:33pm		4	VERSION_BUMP	1acd7a8f
Sep 14, 2024 6:47am		4	VERSION_BUMP	ac0df270