[HN Gopher] ScribeOCR - Web interface for recognizing text, OCR,...
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       ScribeOCR - Web interface for recognizing text, OCR, & creating
       digitized docs
        
       Author : atomicnature
       Score  : 97 points
       Date   : 2025-10-06 10:39 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ranger_danger wrote:
       | This is awesome. Only issue was I had to disable my JShelter
       | extension because it would freeze the page using 100% CPU
       | forever.
        
       | aidenn0 wrote:
       | 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)
        
         | Elucalidavah wrote:
         | > Tesseract (which is the best I have so far)
         | 
         | Have you looked at EasyOCR?
        
           | aidenn0 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | criddell wrote:
             | Have you tried Abbyy FineReader? It's the best OCR package
             | I've seen.
        
         | zihotki wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Zardoz84 wrote:
             | 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)
        
           | aidenn0 wrote:
           | 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...
        
       | zihotki wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | graynk wrote:
         | 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
        
       | fodkodrasz wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | constantinum wrote:
       | anyone looking for an ocr or text pre-processor that maintains
       | the layout(tables, forms) try LLMWhisperer >
       | https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/
        
       | Zardoz84 wrote:
       | If it would generate ALTO XML files... IF!
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-10 23:02 UTC)