n8n-nodes-tesseractjs7

Two n8n community nodes for extracting text from PDF documents.

PDF Recognition Preflight

The preflight node inspects every page without running OCR. It returns the document page count, a top-level recommendation and one recommendation per page. The original PDF binary is passed through unchanged.

{
  "pageCount": 4,
  "recommendedMode": "auto",
  "pages": [
    { "page": 1, "recommendedMode": "native", "wordCount": 221, "imageCoverage": 0.0158 },
    { "page": 4, "recommendedMode": "ocr", "wordCount": 0, "imageCoverage": 1 }
  ]
}

A page is recommended for OCR when its native text layer is clearly broken, contains no valid printable character, contains no words while raster images cover more than 20% of the page, or when raster images cover at least 80% and fewer than 20 native words are present. A page with sufficient native text remains native even when it also contains a large image.

The top-level recommendation is native or ocr when every page agrees, and auto for mixed documents.

PDF Text Recognition

The recognition node supports three modes:

• Auto chooses native text or OCR separately for each selected page.
• Native Text forces native extraction for all selected pages.
• OCR forces OCR for all selected pages.

Pages can be selected either as an inclusive range or as a comma-separated list such as 1,5,6. The two input styles are mutually exclusive in the node interface. OCR pages are processed with up to three Tesseract workers in parallel.

Range output:

{
  "source": "mixed",
  "pageCount": 4,
  "range": { "from": 1, "to": 4 },
  "pages": [
    { "page": 1, "source": "native", "text": "Native PDF text" },
    { "page": 4, "source": "ocr", "text": "Recognized image text", "confidence": 95.2 }
  ]
}

Specific-page output:

{
  "source": "ocr",
  "pageCount": 10,
  "selectedPages": [1, 5, 6],
  "pages": [
    { "page": 1, "source": "ocr", "text": "Recognized text", "confidence": 94.1 }
  ]
}

Parameters

Preflight

• Input PDF Field: binary property containing the PDF, default data

Recognition

• Input PDF Field: binary property containing the PDF, default data
• Recognition Mode: Auto, Native Text or OCR
• Page Selection: Range or Specific Pages
• Page From: first page in range mode, default 1
• Page To: last page in range mode, default 0 for the document end
• Pages: comma-separated page numbers in specific-pages mode, for example 1,5,6
• Language: Tesseract language code, default deu
• DPI: OCR render resolution, default 300
• OCR Timeout: maximum OCR time per page, default 120000 ms

Behavior

• PDF input only
• One output item per input PDF
• Page results remain ordered
• German (deu) is the default OCR language
• OCR uses Tesseract LSTM, automatic page segmentation and preserved inter-word spaces
• No file-size limit, image input, binary OCR output or automatic DPI fallback

Development

npm ci
npm test
npm run lint