Show HN: How do you OCR on a Mac using the CLI or just Python for free

• doctr

  12 3,038 8.9 Python

  docTR (Document Text Recognition) - a seamless, high-performing & accessible library for OCR-related tasks powered by Deep Learning.

  

Tesseract is widely known to be "meh" at this point.

If you look at RAG frameworks as one example they'll typically use/support a variety of implementations. Tesseract is almost always supported but it's rarely ideal with projects like Unstructured[0] and DocTR[1] being preferred. By leveraging more-or-less SOTA vision models[2][3] they embarrass Tesseract.

I haven't compared them to the Apple Vision framework but they're absolutely better than Tesseract and potentially even Apple Vision.

[0] - https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured-inference

[1] - https://github.com/mindee/doctr

[2] - https://github.com/mindee/doctr#models-architectures

[3] - https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured-inference#mo...

• ocrmac

  1 126 6.8 Jupyter Notebook

  A python wrapper to extract text from images on a mac system. Uses the vision framework from Apple.

Nice post, OP! I was super impressed with the Apple's vision framework. I used it on a personal project involving the OCRing of tens of thousands of spreadsheet screenshots and ingesting them into a postgres database.

I used a combination of RHetTbull's vision.py (for the actual implementation) [1] + ocrmac (for experimentation) [2] and was pleasantly surprised by the performance on my i7 6700k hackintosh.

I wouldn't call myself a programmer but I can generally troubleshoot anything if given enough time, but it did cost time.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/RhetTbull/1c34fc07c95733642cffcd1ac5...

[2]: https://github.com/straussmaximilian/ocrmac

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• unstructured-inference

  1 103 8.8 Python
  

Tesseract is widely known to be "meh" at this point.

If you look at RAG frameworks as one example they'll typically use/support a variety of implementations. Tesseract is almost always supported but it's rarely ideal with projects like Unstructured[0] and DocTR[1] being preferred. By leveraging more-or-less SOTA vision models[2][3] they embarrass Tesseract.

I haven't compared them to the Apple Vision framework but they're absolutely better than Tesseract and potentially even Apple Vision.

[0] - https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured-inference

[1] - https://github.com/mindee/doctr

[2] - https://github.com/mindee/doctr#models-architectures

[3] - https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured-inference#mo...

• aichat

  16 2,804 9.6 Rust

  All-in-one AI-Powered CLI Chat & Copilot that integrates 10+ AI platforms, including OpenAI, Azure-OpenAI, Gemini, VertexAI, Claude, Mistral, Cohere, Ollama, Ernie, Qianwen...

use LLMs (gpt-4-vision or LLaVA) with aichat

`aichat -f tmp/test.png -- output only text in the image`

https://github.com/sigoden/aichat

• Camelot

  10 2,639 6.9 Python

  A Python library to extract tabular data from PDFs

  

I had good repeated success extracting tables from PDFs using Camelot (Python, https://github.com/camelot-dev/camelot)

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

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