paper-bidsheets VS OCRmyPDF

I have recently used llama3.2-vision to handle some paper bidsheets for a charity auction and it is fairly accurate with some terrible handwriting. I hope to use it for my event next year.

I do find it rather annoying not being able to get it to consistently output a CSV though. ChatGPT and Gemini seem better at doing that but I haven’t tried to automate it.

The scale of my problem is about 100 pages of bidsheets and so some manual cleaning is ok. It is certainly better than burning volunteers time.

https://github.com/philips/paper-bidsheets

Stars: 19899 Author: ocrmypdf Star the OCRmyPDF repository⭐

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this tool yet, but I’ve found great accuracy and flexibility with [OCRmyPDF](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF). It (usually) detects and fixes page rotation, and works quite well on slanted text or A | B pages in regards to copying and formatting. I believe it uses tesseract in the background, but using it is very simple and it has the just works factor.

and the good old sci-hub.

For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient.

Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs:

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier.

Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.

While I'm a fan of Tika a lot of people get queasy from Java and XML, they might be better served by their preferred scripting language and https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF, which has the same OCR engine.

I’ve been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text to PDFs books I reference a lot (1). My scans are quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.

I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.

1: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., “ Using different Page Segmentation Modes”

Try https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF - it uses Tesseract behind the scenes and it absolutely brilliant.

I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

If by "like a photocopy" you mean the file contains images of text rather than text, the MacOS viewer presumably does OCR on the images. I don't know if there's a Linux document viewer with that capability built-in, but a quick search turned up the standalone tool OCRmyPDF.