PDF OCR Using Gemini LLM

Extract text from PDFs using Google Gemini OCR. Use when extracting text from PDFs, performing OCR on scanned documents, or processing image-based PDFs.

Purpose

Use geminipdfocr to extract text from PDF documents via OCR (Google Gemini).

Data and privacy

Full page images/files are sent to Google's API. PDFs are split into single-page files and each page is uploaded to Google Gemini for OCR. There are no hidden exfiltration endpoints or other data collection. Do not use with highly sensitive documents unless you accept that content is sent to Google.

Setup (venv installation)

Before first use, create and activate the virtual environment:

cd geminipdfocr && python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate && pip install -r requirements.txt

Set GOOGLE_API_KEY in your environment before running (e.g. export GOOGLE_API_KEY=your-key).

How to use

When requested to extract text or perform OCR on a PDF:

1. Run: cd geminipdfocr && source venv/bin/activate && python -m geminipdfocr <path-to-pdf> [--json] [--output <file>]
2. Use --json for structured data.
3. Use --max-pages N for testing or very long documents.
4. Use --quiet to suppress progress logs.

Requirements

• A valid PDF file path.
• GOOGLE_API_KEY set in the process environment (e.g. export GOOGLE_API_KEY=your-key).

CLI options

Option	Description
pdf_path	One or more PDF file paths (positional)
--max-pages N	Limit pages per PDF
--json	Output structured JSON instead of plain text
--output FILE	Write result to file (default: stdout)
--quiet	Suppress INFO/DEBUG logs