Can PyPDF2 read scanned PDF?

PyPDF2 is a Python library used to manipulate PDF files, but it primarily works with text and metadata within PDFs. It does not have built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to read or extract text from scanned PDFs (which are essentially images).

To read text from scanned PDFs, you would need to use an OCR tool or library, such as Tesseract, in combination with PyPDF2 or another PDF library. Here's a basic outline of how you might approach this:

1. Extract Images from PDF: Use a library like PyMuPDF (also known as fitz) or pdf2image to extract images from the scanned PDF.
2. Perform OCR: Use an OCR library like Tesseract to extract text from the images.
3. Process the Text: Once you have the text, you can process it as needed.

Here is a simple example using PyMuPDF and Tesseract:

import fitz  # PyMuPDF
import pytesseract
from PIL import Image

# Open the PDF file
pdf_document = "scanned.pdf"
doc = fitz.open(pdf_document)

# Iterate through the pages
for page_num in range(len(doc)):
    page = doc.load_page(page_num)
    pix = page.get_pixmap()
    img = Image.frombytes("RGB", [pix.width, pix.height], pix.samples)

    # Perform OCR on the image
    text = pytesseract.image_to_string(img)
    print(f"Page {page_num + 1}:\n{text}\n")

In this example:

• PyMuPDF is used to open the PDF and extract images from each page.
• Pytesseract is used to perform OCR on the extracted images.
• The extracted text is then printed out.

You would need to install the required libraries using pip:

pip install pymupdf pytesseract pillow

Additionally, you need to have Tesseract-OCR installed on your system. You can download it from here.

This approach allows you to read text from scanned PDFs, which PyPDF2 alone cannot do.