OCR SDK for Python

Install and run

Install with pip install fastocr-sdk and put your key in FASTOCR_API_KEY. The import is fastocr_sdk; the unrelated fastocr package on PyPI is a different project.

from fastocr_sdk import FastOCR

# Reads the key from the FASTOCR_API_KEY environment variable.
with FastOCR() as client:
    text = client.extract_text("scan.pdf")
    print(text)

from fastocr_sdk import FastOCR

with FastOCR() as client:
    job = client.documents.process("scan.pdf")
    client.documents.download_searchable_pdf(job.id, "searchable.pdf")
    print(job.id, job.status, job.pages_billed)

import asyncio
from fastocr_sdk import AsyncFastOCR

async def main():
    async with AsyncFastOCR() as client:
        text = await client.extract_text("invoice.pdf")
        print(text)

asyncio.run(main())

The SDK streams large files from disk, retries transient failures and never creates a document twice. Every method and error is in the API docs; for cURL and Node.js see the searchable PDF API.

Cloud OCR SDK vs on-premise OCR SDKs

On-premise SDKs such as ABBYY FineReader Engine or Tesseract run the OCR engine on your own machines. fastocr-sdk is a thin client: the engine is the FastOCR service. Pick by where your documents are allowed to go.

Frequently asked questions