# OCRmyPDF v17.4.0

- Product: OCRmyPDF (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ocrmypdf)
- Vendor: ocrmypdf
- Date: 2026-07-17
- Version: v17.4.0
- Original notes: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF/releases/tag/v17.4.0
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ocrmypdf/releases/v17.4.0

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Add ``--no-overwrite`` / ``-n`` option to prevent overwriting output files, exiting with code 5 (``OutputFileAccessError``) if the destination file already exists
- **fixed** — Fix text layer stretching in the fpdf2 renderer for widely-spaced words where horizontal scaling (Tz) was incorrectly stretched to fill inter-word gaps instead of relying on Td positioning
- **fixed** — Fix ``optimize=2`` or ``optimize=3`` crash when using the Python API without explicitly setting ``jpg_quality`` or ``png_quality``
- **fixed** — Fix ``verapdf`` availability check crashing with ``NotADirectoryError`` on some platforms

- Added ``--no-overwrite`` / ``-n`` option to prevent overwriting output files.
  If the destination file already exists, OCRmyPDF exits with code 5
  (``OutputFileAccessError``). {issue}`1642`
- Fixed text layer stretching in the fpdf2 renderer for widely-spaced words.
  The horizontal scaling (Tz) was incorrectly stretched to fill inter-word gaps
  instead of relying on Td positioning, causing text selection to highlight far
  beyond the actual word boundaries. {issue}`1635`
- Fixed ``optimize=2`` or ``optimize=3`` crash when using the Python API without
  explicitly setting ``jpg_quality`` or ``png_quality``. {issue}`1641`
- Fixed ``verapdf`` availability check crashing with ``NotADirectoryError`` on
  some platforms. {issue}`1638`