Resulting PDFs are not searchable in OS X Preview.app

[myxal]

I'm wondering if anyone has tested the resulting PDFs under OS X?
I'm using the PPA version of pdfocr on Ubuntu 14.04 (version reported is 0.1.4)

The behaviour is strange - selection shows that there's definitely some text layer, and it's properly aligned with the image, but whatever I highlight, the selection comes back as a series of spaces. Searching doesn't find anything.

The text is definitely correct in the pdf (judging by the output of pdftotext), and Preview.app definitely supports this feature - here's a PDF where it works properly:
S&W_7-25.pdf

BTW, is it normal to see size increases from 167k -> 430k (single page)? Seems a bit excessive for a mere text layer, but what do I know...

[wodin]

Cut'n'paste and searching work fine for me in evince, but I've just tried it in Preview in OS X and I see the same problem. I can copy "text", but it pastes as spaces, and search doesn't find anything.

There is a separate issue (#28) for the size increase. It seems to happen because pdfocr converts each page to a PNM image before OCRing and then uses these (uncompressed) PNM files to construct the output PDF. If your PDF has a single JPEG per page then you might be able to use the method mentioned by @wilsotc.

See also #23.