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Obsidian
TypeScript NPM Git WebStorm
Windows Linux macOS

⚠️ Still in early development ⚠️

Obsidian OCR

Obsidian OCR allows you to search for text in your images and PDFs

Installation

Dependencies

  • tesseract for OCR
  • imagemagick for pdf to png conversion
Windows
Manual installation

❗Make sure the executables are in your path. If you don't know how look here: https://www.architectryan.com/2018/03/17/add-to-the-path-on-windows-10/❗

Automatic installation

❗The automatic installation features is still in very early development. Expect bugs❗
ℹ️ Obsidian OCR uses chocolatey for automatic installation ℹ

  • Install & enable the plugin
  • Under settings, press the automatic install button
MacOS
  • Install tesseract: brew install tesseract
  • Install tesseract-lang : brew install tesseract-lang
  • Install imagemagick : brew install imagemagick

For the path: check where the binaries are located and add these to "/private/etc/paths" (I also added them to ~/.zshrc, not sure if that is needed)

  • brew list tesseract in my case: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/tesseract/5.2.0/bin/
  • brew list tesseract-lang in my case: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/tesseract/5.2.0/bin/
  • brew list imagemagick in my case: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/imagemagick/7.1.0-43/bin/
Ubuntu
Manual installation
  • Run sudo apt install -y tesseract-ocr imagemagick
  • Install any languages you need by installing the appropriate package (usually named tesseract-ocr-<lang>)
Automatic installation

❗The automatic installation features is still in very early development. Expect bugs❗

  • Install & enable the plugin
  • Under settings, press the automatic install button
Arch / Manjaro
Manual installation
  • Run sudo pacman -S tesseract imagemagick
  • Install any languages you need by installing the appropriate package (usually named tesseract-data-<lang>)
Automatic installation

❗The automatic installation features is still in very early development. Expect bugs❗

  • Install & enable the plugin
  • Under settings, press the automatic install button

Flatpak

If Obsidian is running via the Flatpak installation (such as provided by default in Pop!_OS) then this plugin will not operate. Flatpak sandboxing will change the filepaths so even providing host access will still be problematic. If you have a Flatpak installation you will need to reinstall via a different method to successfully use this plugin.

Plugin installation

  • Simply install the plugin from the community plugins

Usage

  • Upon enabling the plugin, you will see a progress bar in the bottom right, indicating that your vault is currently being processed. Indexing
  • Upon completion, you can either use the Search OCR command or the magnifying-glass icon in the ribbon to open the search menu. SearchModal
  • When adding a new PDF / PNG to your vault, the file is automatically being searched for text.
  • Upon starting Obsidian, you will now see another progress bar, indicating that all transcripts are being cached.
    Caching

Settings

Obsidian OCR offers a variety of settings you can configure yourself.

Name Description Default
Max OCR Processes The maximum amount of ocr processes running at the same time. Increasing this speeds up indexing but also increases cpu usage 1
Max caching processes The maximum amount of caching processes running at the same time. Increaing this speeds up caching but also increases cpu usage 10
OCR Image Decides whether or not images (.png, .jpg, .jpeg) are OCRed true
OCR PDF Decides whether or not PDFs (.pdf) are OCRed true
Image density The density of generated PNGs, in dpi. Increasing this helps to OCR smaller text, but increases cpu usage 300
Image quality The quality of generated PNGs. Increasing this helps to OCR smaller text, but increaes cpu usage 98
Additional imagemagick args Additional commandline arguments passed to imagemagick when converting a PDF to PNG(s)
Additional search paths Additional paths that will be searched when looking for external dependencies. Useful when installing into custom directories
OCR Provider The OCR provider that will be used. See below for a description of providers NoOp

OCR Providers

List of OCR providers

Name Description
NoOp The NoOp (no operation) provider does, as the name implies, nothing and is only a dummy provider. To get real OCR capability, you have to switch to another provider
Tesseract OCR provider using tesseract to OCR documents locally on your computer
Tesseract

By default, tesseract offers two languages to choose from: eng and osd.

  • Osd isn't a language, but rather stands for Orientation and script detection and is therefore not useful for our use.
  • Eng stands for english and should be chosen if your documents are written in english.

ℹ After switching your language, only newly indexed documents use the new language. You can reindex your already added documents by using the Delete all transcripts command ℹ

Lang vs Script

Tesseract supports langs and scripts for text recognition.

  • Langs support a single language
  • Scripts support multiple languages with similar characters. Latin, for example, supports all latin-based languages (English, German, Italian, France, ...) except for Vietnamese

Custom OCR providers

To add a custom OCR provider, create a new class that extends OCRProvider and register it using OCRProviderManager.registerOCRProviders(new MyCustomProvider())