#98 preserve text layer when converting DJVU to PDF

[Nathaniel Beaver]

When converting from DJVU to PDF, ddjvu does not preserve the text layer. For example:

# DJVU has readable text
djvutxt example.djvu | less
# convert from DJVU to PDF. 
ddjvu -format=pdf -quality=85 example.djvu out.pdf
# PDF has no readable text.
pdftotext out.pdf - | less

The only workaround I know is to re-run OCR on the generated PDF.

$ ddjvu --help 2>&1 | head -n 1
DDJVU --- DjVuLibre-3.5.27

Minimal working example is attached.

Relevant link:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/46233/converting-djvu-to-pdf

[Janusz]

It's a kind of overkill, but you can use ocrodjvu (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/ocrodjvu.1.html), by default it does not OCR pages which already have the hidden text. Unfortunatelly it's written Python 2, so it will not be available in future distributions of Debian/Ubuntu.