OCR

This Skill reads text out of pixels: photos, screenshots, scans, whiteboard shots, receipts, and PDF pages that carry no machine-readable text. The Agent Computer image installs RapidOCR with the PP-OCRv6 medium detection and recognition models on the OpenVINO CPU runtime, so recognition runs locally: no network call, no API key, no cost per page.

Do not OCR a document that carries real text. Extraction is exact and instant; recognition is approximate and costs seconds per page:

• DOCX, PPTX, XLSX: parse the real document tree with python-docx, python-pptx, or openpyxl — the docx, pptx, and xlsx Skills own those formats.
• A PDF with a text layer: pdf2md in.pdf extracts it exactly — the pdf Skill owns PDF reading.

Images

An image is the plain case: no exact text source exists, so recognize directly.

ocr.py selects the input type from the file-name suffix. Before the first OCR call, make sure each image has a supported suffix. If an image has no suffix, run file --brief --mime-type -- INPUT, copy it to a temporary path with the suffix that matches the reported type (for example, .jpg for image/jpeg), and pass the copy to ocr.py. Keep the original file unchanged.

python scripts/ocr.py photo.jpg receipt.png       # plain text per input
python scripts/ocr.py screenshot.png --json       # per-line text, score, quad box

Resolve scripts/ocr.py from this Skill's own directory.

PDFs

The pdf Skill's Read section owns PDF triage: it decides which pages carry a text layer and which need recognition. A PDF reaches this Skill in one of three shapes:

• The whole file, classified scanned or image_based: recognize every page.
• A pages_needing_ocr list from a mixed file: pass it to --pages. The text pages are already extracted; do not touch them again.
• A bare, untriaged PDF: do the pdf Skill's Read triage first. A text layer beats recognition, and the triage names the pages that need it.

python scripts/ocr.py in.pdf                 # scanned file, every page
python scripts/ocr.py in.pdf --pages 2,6     # only the listed pages

Cost And Flags

The models load once per process and take seconds; each page then costs roughly one to two seconds of CPU. Pass every input in one invocation instead of looping shell calls. The script accepts --help for full usage.

• --pages limits a PDF to the listed pages, as 2,5-7.
• --dpi (default 200) sets PDF rasterization resolution. Use 300 when the source has small print; cost grows with the square of the value.
• --json adds a confidence score and a quad box per line.

Read The Scores

Recognition output is a claim, not a fact. Before trusting a poor scan, run --json and read the scores: a page whose lines sit under about 0.6 means a bad rasterization, a skewed photo, or an unsupported script — not usable text. Retry a photo after cropping or rotating with ImageMagick, and retry small print at --dpi 300, before concluding the document is unreadable.

Limits

• One model covers 50 languages: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, and the Latin-script European languages. Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic, Thai, and other scripts are not covered. When a document falls outside coverage, do not deliver garbage text; tell the human:

  "This document appears to be in [script], which the local OCR model does not cover. I can work with a text-bearing version of the file, or you can tell me how you want the original handled."

• Output is text lines in reading order with positions. Tables come back as positioned lines, not table markup; formulas and handwriting degrade.
• The Skill reads text out of a document. It does not write a text layer back into a PDF, so it cannot make a PDF searchable.