IndexError: list index out of range (single TIFF file) about archive-pdf-tools

[jrochkind]

OK, I think there may in fact be no way to run recode_pdf on a single-page?

If I use --from-imagestack 'some_dir/*', if that dir only has one image in it -- I still get IndexError: list index out of range

If I use eg --from-imagestack /tmp/scan.tiff (an example from README), I also get IndexError: list index out of range.

If I use --from-imagestack 'some_dir/*' on a directory that has at least two image files in it -- it works.

Is there no way to run on a PDF with only image? Is this a bug?

[MerlijnWajer]

I believe the problem is that this hocr file contains two ocr_page elements, which can happen if you run Tesseract on a TIFF file that contains two images - this seems to be the case here. A tiff with an embedded thumbnail is also seen as two images.

If you tell Tesseract to use only the first image, this problem will go away, try passing -c tessedit_page_number=0.

The --from-imagestack takes a glob as argument, so it can definitely deal with a single image - the problem here occurs because the hOCR file claims to contain two pages. :-)

[MerlijnWajer]

Using:

tesseract -c tessedit_page_number=0 insuring_15.tiff - hocr > /tmp/test.hocr
recode_pdf -v --from-imagestack insuring_15.tiff --hocr-file test.hocr -o out.pdf

out.pdf

[jrochkind]

Oh right, that makes sense!

Thank you for helping me figure this out, and suggesting the tesseract command to only take the first one!

Now that you mention it, I recall us having problems before with these embedded thumbnails that our production process winds up embedding for reasons we don't really know. But I had forgotten about that, and hadn't noticed the double page in the HOCR.

It seems like it might be better to get a more clear error message like "number of pages in HOCR does not match number of images provided" -- but this might not be the highest priority in archive-pdf-tools.

I will close this issue. Thanks so much for your help, and for providing this code!

[MerlijnWajer]

Thanks for the suggestion, I have committed said error message in commit 11661f2. (Untested)