OCR Extractor: Extract text from documents, images, etc. as searchable Markdown

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When I migrated from Evernote to Obsidian, the one feature I missed was built-in OCR to allow for easy searching within PDFs in notes. There are a few plugins currently available, but none of them were a great fit for how I use Obsidian.

So I’m happy to announce a new plugin: OCR Extractor. It uses Mistral AI’s OCR (which just released a major upgrade) to extract text from documents, images, etc. in your notes. This does require a paid Mistral account, but it’s very reasonable at a current cost of $2 per 1,000 pages processed.

Following Obsidian’s philosophy of storing data in an open, future-proof file format, the extracted text is added below the embedded attachment as an expandable callout. This means that the text will be searchable via Obsidian’s built-in search, other search plugins, and even your operating system’s native file search.

Here’s a demo showing how it works:

demo

Plugin: OCR Extractor

GitHub: jritzi/ocr-extractor

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I just released version 1.2.0, which introduces support for Tesseract, a free and local OCR engine for those who prefer not to use a paid option involving a third-party service. It’s not as accurate, but it’s a great, basic option. The next step will be looking at the possibility of supporting more advanced local models.

If anyone has suggestions for models to support or features they’re interested in, let me know!