Good Morning!
I’m using Libreoffice 7.4.0.3
When opening a PDF file through Libreoffice Draw, text recognition is automatically performed and it is pasted over the original PDF image, making it unfeasible to use.
Does anyone know how I can disable this automatic text recognition when opening a PDF document?
follow example:
No, LibreOffice does not perform any “text recognition”. The text is already there in the document, as a kind of overlay (you may try to select the text in the PDF using your PDF reader, copy and paste somewhere - to see that it’s there, though invisible/transparent). LibreOffice just shows it in black.
Hence, there’s no way to tell LibreOffice to selectively avoid importing something already present in the document.
Hi Mke!
thank you for quick answer.
Let me explaining better the problem.
when i open the pdf file in adobe reader, it opens normally as if it were a scanned document. However, when I open it in Libreoffice draw, it is processing the document’s content, I see a progress bar at the bottom of the program and when the document finally opens, it contains several text boxes overlapping the original text. As if it had been OCRed. to exemplify I moved the text boxes to a position above the original text. follow example.
It was already crystal clear; I answered you above. The text is already there, in the PDF, just is transparent.
As I looked into this, this is what I learned:
Libreoffice Draw does not add any text or do any OCR, the text objects are already present in the pdf but all other pdf editors or viewers do not show them by default.
The text objects allow you to select and copy text from the pdf.
Libreoffice has an open issue about making them invisible until selected, like other viewers: 104770 – Fileopen of OCR'ed PDF also shows otherwise hidden text so looks duplicated
If you do not care about copying or using the text objects, you can remove them before opening the pdf in libreoffice, using the ghostscript cli command:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER \
-dFILTERTEXT \
-sOutputFile=output_without_ocr.pdf \
"input.pdf"
The easiest way is to select the image of the page and arrange it to the top. You won’t see the text then
The easiest way in my personal opinion is use a pdf reader draw is not meant as a pdf reader.