ScribeOCR – Web interface for recognizing text, OCR, & creating digitized docs(github.com)
114 pointsby atomicnature4 months ago6 comments
  • fodkodrasz4 months ago
    I really like the idea, but unfortunately it could not cope with my usecase.

    I have some lecture slides as image-only PDF (Hungarian language with a sparkle of English and Latin (biology)). I tried the tool on it and I had the following experience:

    - proofreading with the overlay seems like a good idea, actually it is unusable when the original text has colors, and you need to recognize diacritic marks. Being able to show the original in grayscale or black&white could help. (BW worked, but Grayscale left everything colored)

    - For proofreading the ebook mode was the most useful, I immediately spotted lots of errors that I could not see with overlay. A quick switch between the modes would be useful

    - Editing text is not efficient when error rate is high (Hungarian language is not supported, that caused it mostly I guess), the interface has high overhead for mass corrections.

    Very good idea, I think after a little polish it would even fit my usecase. For more traditional OCR usecases than mine it is probably already great.

  • zihotki4 months ago
    According to what I read in the documentation, it uses Tesseract underneath. I've used Tesseract v3 in the past and it was pain. Tesseract 4 uses LSTM neural net. How good is the performance and quality of the recognition nowadays in v4? Could anyone share his experience?
    • graynk4 months ago
      I use paperless-ngx for digitizing all my documents, it also uses Tesseract. The result is not perfect, but more than acceptable, if I scan at 600dpi
      • oigursh4 months ago
        There's https://github.com/icereed/paperless-gpt as a plugin
        • graynk3 months ago
          Local LLMs I've found to not be good enough for OCR (while being a lot more resource hungry), and OpenAI models I want to avoid for privacy reasons. Default tesseract does the job for me, since my only requirements for the results it "I can easily find what I need with full-text search" - I rarely need to actually copy the text from the resulting PDFs
    • btian4 months ago
      it's fine for simple use cases, but far inferior to the likes of GPT, Gemini or Mistral
  • aidenn04 months ago
    This is my first encounter with Scribe.js; since I have many book scans I always try OCRing them when I see this. Compared to Tesseract (which is the best I have so far), it gets the words right slightly more, but the paragraph segmentation is many times worse. On a book where every paragraph is indented, it reliably decides two consecutive one-line paragraphs are the same paragraph, which is understandable, but a downgrade from Tesseract which gets the paragraph segmentation as correct as possible (It doesn't handle paragraphs that spanpage-breaks, since I'm feeding it one page at a time)
    • zihotki4 months ago
      Scribe is Tesseract. It uses tesseract.js which is a Web Assembly port of Tesseract. So they in theory should be equal. In practice custom settings or older versions could make a difference.
      • aidenn04 months ago
        This is only true in the "speed" mode; in the "quality" mode it claims better word recognition than Tesseract on clean scans (which matches my tests): https://github.com/scribeocr/scribe.js/blob/master/docs/scri...
      • criddell4 months ago
        What's the motivation for doing this in the browser? It seems like intentionally choosing a more difficult path to create an inferior result.

        A native MacOS or Windows application could use the OCR facilities of the operating system and, in my experience, both produce results that are far better than Tesseract.

        • Zardoz844 months ago
          Generate the OCR on the fly, in the browser, when you do not have the proper OCR info. As someone that works on public web libraries, I see it useful (but wasteful)
    • Elucalidavah4 months ago
      > Tesseract (which is the best I have so far)

      Have you looked at EasyOCR?

      • aidenn04 months ago
        EasyOCR is significantly worse than Tesseract for clean printed text and , while being orders of magnitude slower; far better than Tesseract for low-quality clean scans and extracting text from pictures (e.g. comics), which Tesseract does not as well.
        • criddell4 months ago
          Have you tried Abbyy FineReader? It's the best OCR package I've seen.
          • aidenn04 months ago
            It doesn't seem to have a Linux version; I don't have a mac or windows machine.
            • 4 months ago
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  • ranger_danger4 months ago
    This is awesome. Only issue was I had to disable my JShelter extension because it would freeze the page using 100% CPU forever.
  • constantinum4 months ago
    anyone looking for an ocr or text pre-processor that maintains the layout(tables, forms) try LLMWhisperer > https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/
  • Zardoz844 months ago
    If it would generate ALTO XML files... IF!