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Feature Request: Implement OCR engine for text recognition in image-based PDFs

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#288 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

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@KnifeLemon is already working on this.

Since Oct 20, 2026.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
backend, full-stack

Research direction

Start by locating Filee's PDF-to-DOCX conversion flow and its existing handling of image-only PDF pages; the issue does not name files, tests, or entry points. Then assess how an OCR engine, an enablement setting, and language selection could fit that flow. Done means scanned PDF text can be recognized into editable, searchable DOCX content, with OCR optional and a primary language selectable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

What would you like Filee to do?
I would like Filee to integrate an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine. This system should automatically recognize and extract editable text from PDF files where pages are saved as images (e.g., scanned documents), instead of just rendering them as flat images inside the final .docx file.

Why / when would you use it?
Currently, when converting a PDF that consists of scanned pages or image-only text into Word format, Filee converts the pages back into images and inserts them into the document. This leaves the text completely uneditable. Introducing OCR would allow users to get fully editable and searchable Word documents from any type of PDF source, which is crucial for digitizing scanned documents.

Ideas for how it could work (optional — engine or library suggestions welcome)

  • Integrate an open-source OCR engine like Tesseract OCR (or an appropriate library depending on the language/framework Filee is built on).
  • Add a toggle switch or a settings option in the format selection menu (e.g., "Enable OCR / Text Recognition") so users can turn it on when processing scanned files.
  • Allow users to select the primary document language for better recognition accuracy.
Dominant language
C#
Stars
3.6k
Forks
192
Avg merge
4h 6m
Merged PRs (30d)
158

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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