pdfOCR 3.0.2

pdfOCR is our add-on for iText Core to perform OCR on documents and images.

In this release we’ve added support for pdfOCR to be able to intelligently recognize table data and convert it into the correct tag structure in the resulting PDF documents.

A bug for the incorrect font size being selected for particularly small text was also fixed.

New features

• Table recognition support

Bug fixes

• Incorrect font size for small text in the PDFs generated with pdfOCR

pdfOCR 3.0.1

pdfOCR is our add-on for iText Core to perform OCR on documents and images.

For this release, the artifact names have been changed to reflect the new naming structure. In addition, since Bouncy Castle is a dependency for tests the .NET version has been updated to use the latest 2.2.1 version.

Improvements

• Updated .NET Bouncy Castle dependency to 2.2.1

pdfOCR 3.0.0

pdfOCR is our add-on for iText Core to perform OCR on documents and images.

For this release, an incompatibility issue when using JDK19 and the Leptonica library which could result in a MethodTooLargeException has now been resolved. Otherwise, this release is for compatibility with the iText Core version 8.x.x release.

Bug fixes

Resolved incompatibility issue with JDK19 and Leptonica library.

pdfOCR 2.0.2

For this release of our OCR add-on for iText 7, we have upgraded the underlying tess4j library to version 4.6.0, which uses version 4.1.3 of the Tesseract OCR engine and version 1.82.0 of the Leptonica image processing and analysis library.

A small note for users encountering a MethodTooLargeException with JDK19 and pdfOCR; there is currently an issue with the Leptonica library and JDK19. See this issue for more information and a possible solution.

Improvements

• Updated tess4j:tess4j from 4.5.5 to 4.6.0, which pushes the following upgrades (Tesseract 4.1.3 (f38e7a7) & Leptonica 1.82.0 (lept4j-1.16.1))

pdfOCR 2.0.1

This maintenance release updates the underlying glue (tess4j) with Tesseract to 4.5.5. There is not much to write home about, but we want to keep track of these underlying versions updates so we are ready for when bigger changes come about.

Improvements

• Upgrade tesseract up to 4.5.5

pdfOCR 2.0.0

The pdfOCR 2.0.0 release brings the support of the new Unified License Mechanism along with the other products in the iText 7 Suite, and removes some deprecated API methods.

As the icing on the cake though, it benefits from all the improvements featured in iText 7 Core 7.2.0.

Breaking Changes

• Removed deprecated methods from API

New Features

• Unified License Mechanism

pdfOCR 1.0.3

This the first release of the pdfOCR add-on this year.
It brings more advanced image type detection. From now on, pdfOCR does not rely on the file extension to determine the image type, but instead it detects the image type by considering a file's content to prevent errors in OCR processes.
It allows you to use files with unknown or incorrect extensions as an input, providing they have the correct structure from a specifications point of view.

Improvements

• image type detection based on file content

pdfOCR 1.0.2

pdfOCR 1.0.2 is already the third release of our newest project.

It brings some important improvements which allow you to process documents more precisely. These are:

1. Refinement of the symbol position based on the HOCR data that fixes output for Thai and some CJK fonts. This is especially important for our pdfCalligraph customers.

You can turn it on with: tesseract4OcrEngineProperties.setUseTxtToImproveHocrParsing(true);

2. Possibility for configuration of image preprocessing. That allows smoothing out fluctuations in a document's brightness to give you better results in cases of images taken by a camera.
   You can pass the parameters which are described on http://www.leptonica.org/binarization.html using tesseract4OcrEngineProperties.setImagePreprocessingOptions

Improvements

• Combine HOCR and TXT outputs for more precise text recognition
• Add possibility to set image preprocessing properties (adaptive threshold tile size, threshold smoothing)

pdfOCR 1.0.1

Hot on the heels of our initial release, we're releasing 1.0.1 already!

We've made improvements to the way that the calculations for word bounding boxes are made, so that in languages where ligatures are required, we are able to properly detect the text and render each character correctly.

Improvements

• Improvements in word bbox calculation

pdfOCR 1.0.0

We are proud to announce the first release of pdfOCR, the newest addition to our iText 7 Suite, which enables you to OCR your images into fully ISO-compliant PDF or PDF/A-3u files, making it possible to access and process the text they contain.

Given that we rely on the open-source Tesseract 4.x project to do the heavy lifting, we couldn't, in conscience, not make this add-on open source as well.

You may also notice that we have split up the project in two. We have an API module and the implementation module for Tesseract. In essence this means that you can hook up other OCR engines to iText, but it also means that we're not closing the door on taking on more options for our users to choose from.