What's Changed

• Added scribe CLI command
  • If scribe.js is installed globally (npm i -g scribe.js-ocr), the scribe command can be used to process documents from the command line.
    • For example, scribe recognize analyst_report.png runs OCR on an image and saves the result as a PDF.
  • This feature is still experimental and command/argument names and features may change without warning.
• Added new intermediate data format .scribe for storing and loading document data.
  • Given OCR is computationally expensive, it is often desirable to save results for later use without losing data.
  • By saving results to .scribe files, results can be re-loaded later (e.g. to export with slightly different settings).
    • While several other output formats can be re-loaded later (notably .hocr and .pdf), only .scribe can be re-loaded without any data being lost in the export/import process.
    • .scribe files only contain the text layer; they do not contain embedded images or PDF files.
      • .scribe files can be loaded alongside image/PDF files to restore both image and text data.

Full Changelog: v0.7.4...v0.8.0

What's Changed

• Fixed bug causing crash for certain PDF input documents.
• Added support for bold + italic style (previously only bold or italic style)
• Added support for underline style.
  • Underlined text is currently detected automatically when importing a text-native PDF or Abbyy XML file.
• Disabled ligatures by default.
  • To re-enable, set scribe.opt.ligatures to true.

Full Changelog: v0.7.3...v0.7.4

What's Changed

• Updated HTML export to support Node.js

Full Changelog: v0.7.2...v0.7.3

What's Changed

• Added HTML output format (browser only).
  • This implementation is still preliminary; the implementation may change substantially in future versions.
• Standardized fonts and font names

Full Changelog: v0.7.1...v0.7.2

What's Changed

• Standardized fonts and font names

Full Changelog: v0.7.0...v0.7.1

What's Changed

• Major rework of PDF export implementation.
  • Writing to PDF is faster and uses less memory.
    • Documents that used to crash due to memory errors now run almost instantly.
  • For many inputs, output PDF file sizes are now much smaller.
• Fixed memory leaks within OCR module.
• Misc bug fixes.

Full Changelog: v0.6.1...v0.7.0

What's Changed

• Fixed Node.js support on Windows (#9)
• Fixed platform-related installation issues (#27, #29)
• Increased use of workers in Node.js version, enabling much better performance using a single process.

Full Changelog: v0.5.1...v0.6.1

What's Changed

• Fixed bug causing crashes when recognizing certain PDFs using Node.js (#26)
• Minor updates

Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.5.1

What's Changed

• Added config argument to recognize, which allows for passing arguments to Tesseract.js (#22)
• Added support for parsing PDF text at various orientations (90/180/270 degrees).
• Minor improvements to OCR quality.
• Various improvements to imports of HOCR and native PDF text.
• Added saveAs utility function for saving files.
• Added opt.kerning option that can be used to enable or disable kerening.

Full Changelog: v0.4.1...v0.5.0

What's Changed

• Implemented parallel processing by default for Node.js version
  • To restore the previous behavior (1 worker), set scribe.opt.workerN = 1 before calling any functions.
• Non-default behavior for extracting text from PDF files is now handled by setting the properties of scribe.opt.usePDFText.
• Added Nimbus Mono font (similar to Courier)
• Improvements to text extraction from PDF files.
• Improvements to text positioning.

Full Changelog: v0.3.1...v0.4.1

Note: This post combines changes for 0.4.0 and 0.4.1 since the former was only the most recent version for a few hours.