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anonymizer

Troubleshooting

“This PDF has no text layer”

The PDF is scanned (an image, not real text). MVP-0 doesn’t OCR. Options:

  • Convert with an external OCR tool first (Adobe Acrobat, Tesseract, ABBYY) and re-upload
  • Wait for MVP-1 which bundles Tesseract-based OCR

The web UI didn’t open

If you ran anonymize and no browser tab appeared:

  1. Look for the printed URL in the terminal (e.g., http://127.0.0.1:54321) and open it manually
  2. If no URL printed, check ~/.anonymizer/logs/<date>.log for errors
  3. On Linux without a default browser, set BROWSER=firefox (or your browser) before running

”Permission denied” during install on macOS/Linux

The install script writes to ~/.local/share/uv/tools/ and ~/.local/bin/. If either is owned by another user (e.g., you sudo-installed something else there once), chown them to your user:

Terminal window
sudo chown -R $USER ~/.local

“Antivirus blocked the install” on Windows

Some AV engines flag fresh Python wheels until they get reputation. Workarounds:

  1. Use the Corporate / offline setup airgap workflow with an explicit allowlist
  2. Add %LOCALAPPDATA%\uv\ to your AV’s exclusion list
  3. Wait — usually reputation builds within a few days of a release

”Update banner won’t go away even after upgrading”

The version check is cached for 60 minutes. To force a recheck, restart anonymize. If the banner persists, check that anonymize --version matches what you expect — there may be two installs on PATH.

”Tokens don’t match between two runs of the same document”

By design. Token numbering is per-session. See Tokens.

Reporting a different problem

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