Simon Willison’s Weblog

textract-cli. This is my other OCR project from yesterday: I built the thinnest possible CLI wrapper around Amazon Textract, out of frustration at how hard that tool is to use on an ad-hoc basis.

It only works with JPEGs and PNGs (not PDFs) up to 5MB in size, reflecting limitations in Textract’s synchronous API: it can handle PDFs amazingly well but you have to upload them to an S3 bucket yet and I decided to keep the scope tight for the first version of this tool.

Assuming you’ve configured AWS credentials already, this is all you need to know:

pipx install textract-cli
textract-cli image.jpeg > output.txt # 30th March 2024, 7:01 pm

unstructured. Relatively new but impressively capable Python library (Apache 2 licensed) for extracting information from unstructured documents, such as PDFs, images, Word documents and many other formats.

I got some good initial results against a PDF by running “pip install ’unstructured[pdf]’” and then using the “unstructured.partition.pdf.partition_pdf(filename)” function.

There are a lot of moving parts under the hood: pytesseract, OpenCV, various PDF libraries, even an ONNX model—but it installed cleanly for me on macOS and worked out of the box. # 2nd February 2024, 2:47 am

Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found. DocumentCloud’s Sanjin Ibrahimovic reviews the best options for OCR. Tesseract scores highly for easily machine readable text, newcomer docTR is great for ease of use but still not great at handwriting. Amazon Textract is great for everything except non-Latin languages, Google Cloud Vision is great at pretty much everything except for ease-of-use. Azure AI Document Intelligence sounds worth considering as well. # 31st October 2023, 7:21 pm

textra (via) Tiny (432KB) macOS binary CLI tool by Dylan Freedman which produces high quality text extraction from PDFs, images and even audio files using the VisionKit APIs in macOS 13 and higher. It handles handwriting too! # 23rd March 2023, 9:08 pm

Digitizing 55,000 pages of civic meetings (via) Philip James has been building public, searchable archives of city council meetings for various cities—Oakland and Alamedia so far—using my s3-ocr script to run Textract OCR against the PDFs of the minutes, and deploying them to Fly using Datasette. This is a really cool project, and very much the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to support with the tools I’ve been building. # 22nd August 2022, 4:26 pm

Organize and Index Your Screenshots (OCR) on macOS (via) Alexandru Nedelcu has a very neat recipe for creating an archive of searchable screenshots on macOS: set the default save location for screenshots to a Dropbox folder, then create a launch agent that runs a script against new files in that folder to run tesseract OCR to convert them into a searchable PDF. # 18th July 2021, 4:11 pm

Google Docs OCR. Whoa, the Google Docs API just got really interesting—you can upload an image to it (POST /feeds/default/private/full?ocr=true) and it will OCR the text and turn it in to a document. Since this is Google, I imagine they’ll also be using the processed documents to further improve their OCR technology. # 29th September 2009, 9:57 pm

OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. John dissects the brilliant Greasemonkey script that solves simple captchas using the canvas element and HTML5’s getImageData API. # 25th January 2009, 12 am

tesseract-ocr. Open source OCR, sponsored by Google. I just sat in on a talk on this at OSCON and the complexity of the problem is pretty incredible. # 26th July 2007, 8:23 pm