gImageReader VS tesseract-ocr

On tesseract base here is a software to make a scan a text searchable pdf. It take a bit of time and can be a bit tedious but it does the work! https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader/releases It does not work well on cursive writing of course. It's a bit less heavy code sided solution. Good luck!

I'm working with old newspaper PDFs to convert them into DOC formats. I'm having a great time with gImageReader by highlighting columns and converting them to plain text. Then I take that plain text into Libreoffice Writer (7.0.4.2) to clean up and save. If this were a book as opposed to a newspaper with ads and columns, it would have bee a lot easier to convert and format.

It would help to know a bit more of your usecase. If you're looking to just extract the text (ie, take all the textual content of your PDF and drop it into a separate text document), there are solutions like ABBYY Finereader and gImageReader. If you're looking to make PDFs searchable (keeping the scanned pages, but adding a text layer underneath so you can search and copy from them), there's NAPS2 (which has an additional command line tool for automation) and OCRmyPDF.

OpenSource OCR... for desktop users I like "gImageReader" URL: https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader (Technically is GUI for tessaract)

gImageReader is the linux standard that I'm aware of. It's a GUI to Tessaeract, but IIRC you can use other models if you have them.

gImageReader as a simple OCR application

https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader ^^ seems like it has installers for different OS's

You will also need to install the Tesseract OCR engine, which can be downloaded and installed from the following link: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

PyTesseract Module [ Github ] EasyOCR Module [ Github ] PaddlePaddle OCR [ Github ]

It uses teseract for the OCR https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Last update was pretty recent, and the git mentions tesseract 5 as a dep. so it's likely moved on a bit from when you last tried it:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases

I suppose it depends on your use-case. For personal tasks like this it should be more than sufficient, and won't need user details/cc or whatever to use it.

Tesseract is an open-source OCR engine developed by Google. It is highly accurate and supports multiple languages. This library will do all the heavy lifting for us. We'll use it in this tutorial to quickly read the text in some images.

> Does android even have native OCR?

Tesseract? https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Install Google Tesseract OCR (additional info how to install the engine on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows). You must be able to invoke the tesseract command as tesseract. If this isn’t the case, for example because tesseract isn’t in your PATH, you will have to change the “tesseract_cmd” variable pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd. Under Debian/Ubuntu you can use the package tesseract-ocr. For Mac OS users. please install homebrew package tesseract.

OCR detection will be done with Tesseract.

I’ve used Tesseract for this. It seems to work well with tabular data. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

If you go this route, then using an app that can convert your handwritten notes to a digital format (indexed text), will give you a good balance between cognitive processing and efficient data storage/management; you can likely find many such apps on the App Store or Google Play. If you're interested in something more hands-on, on Arch you can probably experiment with Tesseract OCR in an interesting way (Example).