Setup & Installation
Or with the ClawHub CLI, for registry-managed skill folders outside a full OpenClaw workspace:
What This Skill Does
OpenOCR is a Python library for extracting text from images, scanned documents, and PDFs. It provides five task modes: text detection, text recognition, end-to-end OCR, VLM-based recognition for formulas and tables, and document parsing with layout analysis. Supports Chinese, English, and other languages.
Handles text, formulas, tables, and layout-aware document parsing in a single library, eliminating the need for separate specialized OCR tools.
When to use it
- Converting scanned PDF invoices to searchable text
- Extracting LaTeX formulas from academic paper screenshots
- Parsing tables from document images into structured format
- Batch processing folders of scanned receipts
- Converting document images to Markdown with layout preserved
Example Workflow
Here's how your AI assistant might use this skill in practice.
User asks: Parse this scanned research paper PDF and save it as Markdown
- 1Initialize OpenOCR with task='doc' and use_layout_detection=True
- 2Run document parsing on the PDF file
- 3Iterate over per-page results
- 4Save each page result to Markdown using doc.save_to_markdown()
Markdown files saved to output directory, one per page, with text, formulas, and tables preserved in structure