11 items tagged “ocr”
2023
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
How I make annotated presentations
Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.
[... 2122 words]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
2022
Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society
The San Francisco Microscopical Society was founded in 1870 by a group of scientists dedicated to advancing the field of microscopy.
[... 1845 words]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
Litestream backups for Datasette Cloud (and weeknotes)
My main focus this week has been adding robust backups to the forthcoming Datasette Cloud.
[... 1604 words]s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket
I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database with full-text search configured so you can run searches against the extracted data.
[... 1493 words]2021
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
2009
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
2007
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