Help setting up PDF search and OCR

[tkonto]

Dear All,

First of all, thank you in advance for Your time on this.

I am trying to setup PDF full image/text search (some PDFs are just images and not text) in my NextCloud 25.0.6 instance. It runs on Rokcy Linux 8 (fully updated) as a web page, served by the host’s apache server (not running as container image or virtual image).

Googling around and searching in this forum, I started by installing Tesseract and adding the English language for start.

Under Admin → Administration → Full Text Search, I could see nothing but “General Settings” with the “Search Platform” empty. Also show in the bellow screenshot.

Then again looking for information in the Wiki I concluded (maybe wrongly?) that I have to install ElasticSearch.

So I did.

At that point, the Search Platform option could be populated (Elasticsearch was an option) and only then the Tessearct OCR options became available.

All the above, as the admin user.

I do have a small doubt about the elasticsearch part specifically the url setting as the installation is using certs for authentication:

Now I login as a non-admin user and create a flow.

And I also add the following with crontab -u apache -e:

*/5 * * * * php -f /mnt/services//www/html/nextcloud/cron.php

At this point I expect as a non admin user:

1. Adding the OCR tag to a pdf file, this to be OCRed.
2. Searching words contained in the pdf (English language pdf) to return results pointing to that document
3. The cron job to do something (but what???)

What I actually have is:

1. Adding the OCR tag to a pdf, does not seam to OCR it.
2. The disks are 100% active. Tools for tracing activity (iotop, top, ps etc) show that there php -f /mnt/services//www/html/nextcloud/cron.php is running all the time (doing what?) and mariadb is constantly updating tuples.

So my questions:

1. Do I correctly think that Tessaract ocr will actually fully ocr any English pdf document with the OCR tag assigned to it?
2. Are the above steps take correct towards that?
3. Am I missing something?
4. Do I have a correct test case (assign the OCR tag to a pdf & wait for it to be indexed)?
5. Where does elasticsearch fit in the setup?
6. Why is the system (cron.php / mysql) so busy? Doing what? How to find out?

Much appreciated.
Cheers,
Theo

[vap0rtranz]

Hi Theo,

Did you get this working?

I’m looking for a similar setup – making PDFs imbedded with images searchable after OCR.

I can only comment on a few of your questions:

Tessaract should be doing the OCR of the PDFs, so perhaps there’s a way to enable its logfile.
Elasticsearch is an indexing datastore service that needs to be running because it responds to the search requests.
Cron would be running because its the process that fires off a regular job, like re-indexing files every night, or whenever the schedule is setup.
MySQL would be running as the backend to Nextcloud’s datastore of files.

I’m not sure if my answers help because it’s not clear to me what the working process is for making the image content of PDFs searchable in Nextcloud …

JP

[vap0rtranz]

P.S.

I searched and there’s another thread from a few months ago that hints at the problem being install-time setup. Here is the thread (and yea it’s a bit long, and has no conclusive fix):

Tesseract on Nextcloud AIO docker - Features & apps / ocr - Nextcloud community

Based on your post and the other thread, I’m guessing that the AIO or docker installs do not setup the combination of services needed (so Tesseract + Elasticsearch, and their ports, any TLS certs, their file permissions; plus the language packs, etc.) and a manual install is needed to verify that each component is working.

[ris]

You cant. AIO will not work wih OCR.