Figured I would try to contribute by answering my own question (have written some nice code for myself and could not have done it without help from this board). If you cat the pdf files in unix (well, osx for me), then the pdf files that have text will have the word "Font" in them (as a string, but mixed in with other text) b/c that's how the file tells Adobe what fonts to do display.
The cat command in bash seems to have the same output as reading the file in binary mode in python (using 'rb' mode when opening file instead of 'w' or 'r' or 'a'). So I'm assuming that all pdf files that contain text with have the word "Font" in the binary output and that no image-only files ever will. If that's always true, then this code will make a list of all pdf files in a single directory that have text and a separate list of those that have only images. It saves each list to a separate .txt file, then you can use a command in bash to move the pdf files to the appropriate folder.
Once you have them in their own folders, then you can run your batch ocr solution on just the pdf files in the images_only folder. I haven't gotten that far yet (obviously).
import os, re
#path is the directory with the files, other 2 are the names of the files you will store your lists in
path = 'C:/folder_with_pdfs'
files_with_text = open('files_with_text.txt', 'a')
image_only_files = open('image_only_files.txt', 'a')
#have os make a list of all files in that dir for a loop
filelist = os.listdir(path)
#compile regular expression that matches "Font"
mysearch = re.compile(r'.*Font.*', re.DOTALL)
#loop over all files in the directory, open them in binary ('rb'), search that binary for "Font"
#if they have "Font" they have text, if not they don't
#(pdf does something to understand the Font type and uses this word every time the pdf contains text)
for pdf in filelist:
openable_file = os.path.join(path, pdf)
cat_file = open(openable_file, 'rb')
usable_cat_file = cat_file.read()
#print usable_cat_file
if mysearch.match(usable_cat_file):
files_with_text.write(pdf + '\n')
else:
image_only_files.write(pdf + '\n')
To move the files, I entered this command in bash shell:
cat files_with_text.txt | while read i; do mv $i Volumes/hard_drive_name/new_destination_directory_name; done
Also, I didn't re-run the python code above, I just hand-edited the thing, so it might be buggy, Idk.
