Apache PDFBox VS tesseract-ocr

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

If you don't mind using java, you can use the open source Apache PDFBox library

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's relatively performant and it's a mature and supported codebase that can accomplish most pdf tasks.

Then, open the pdf_utils/pom.xml file and add a dependency to PDFBox, in the dependencies section:

There are some libraries for Java that can help you create a PDF file such as PDFBox or IText. Here there's a short exaplanation on how to use them.

So, when I started to view the documents, a lot of them simply failed to open. I had to look around for a library that could verify PDF documents. I had some experience with PDFBox in the past, so it seemed to be a good go-to solution. It had no way to verify documents by default, but it could open and parse them and that was enough to filter out the incorrect ones. It felt a little bit strange just to read the whole PDF into the memory to verify if it is correct or not, but hey I needed a simple fix for now and it worked really well.

PDFBox can do this. It’s not part of the CLI but it wouldn’t be too hard to add:

https://github.com/apache/pdfbox/blob/5b00807463279f1002e245...

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).