📣 pText release 1.9.0

This release features quite a few new functionalities:

• OCR
• Pantone colors
• Markdown to PDF conversion

It also features some minor improvements to general layout logic:

• Tables are now automatically completed (with empty Paragraph objects)
• support for heterogeneous paragraphs (see ChunksOfText object)
• layout package refactor to separate classes

OCR

Using Tesseract (or rather pytesseract), pText is now able to handle scanned images in a PDF.
Typically, a scanned document will present itself as a PDF, without containing any content other than the image of the page.
pText can now restore text to such PDF documents.

The OCR capabilities have been integrated nicely with the existing EventListener framework. New events have been added to represent scanned text being recognized.
Two extra implementations of EventListener deal with OCR:

• OCRImageRenderEventListener : is triggered whenever an image is detected in the PDF, scans the image, and produces OCREvent objects
• OCRAsOptionalContentGroup : extends OCRImageRenderEventListener and adds optional (invisible) content to the PDF, representing the recognized text

pytesseract is not added as a dependency in the setup script.
If you do choose to use OCR, you should install pytesseract and download the Tesseract data directories.

Pantone colors

Pantone colors are now supported, similar to X11Color, Pantone has a dictionary of names, mapped to hexadecimal strings.
When constructing a Pantone object, simply pass a valid color-name, and you'll receive its corresponding HexColor object.

Markdown to PDF

pText can now convert (simple) Markdown to PDF.
It does not (yet) support HTML, since that would require an entire HTML engine.

pText supports:

• Headers
• Tables
• Ordered lists (not nested)
• Unordered lists (not nested)
• Code snippet (by indent, and fenced)
• Blockquote
• Images
• Paragraphs
• Horizontal rules

Check the examples and tests to get a better idea of what is supported, and find a demo-document and its matching output.