What is the best OCR application to go with Paperless-ngx?
reddit / selfhosted

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DastardlyDino · 2023-11-01 13:20

Feel like I've been seeing a lot of buzz about Paperless-ngx recently
on this sub so I decided to try it out. So far it has worked out great
for me. I am currently using my phone as the scanner since it's
cheaper than buying a full on scanner right now. So I'm curious for
those using your phones to scan documents and receipts into Paperless-
ngx what scanner app do you believe to have the best OCR? Is it
Microsoft lens, Google Lookout, Google Stack, Adobe PDF Scanner,
Paperless mobile using ngx's built in OCR or some other app I don't
know about?

Side question. Besides the what is probably a better flow of getting
documents into Paperless-ngx by using one of the recommended dedicated
scanners, does a scanner improve the performance/search function of
Paperless-ngx?

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paperjam84 · 2023-11-01 13:33

Paperless has an OCR engine. You can configure one or even multiple
languages when setting it up. No need to pre process your scanned PDFs
before adding them to Paperless.
It uses OCRMyPDF which is based on Tesseract.

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Couch941 · 2023-11-01 14:04

>does a scanner improve the performance/search function of Paperless-
ngx?


what?

And like u/paperjam84 already said, paperless has its own OCR engine
that works perfectly fine, for me at least.

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ZAFJB · 2023-11-01 14:50

Paperless-NGX *is* an OCR app. Why do you need another?

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hclpfan · 2023-11-01 16:00

Microsoft lens is my favorite for generating the PDD from camera.

In terms of OCR though as others have said paperless already handles
that for you. No need for anything else.

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DastardlyDino · 2023-11-01 16:26

So if you use Microsoft lens, if I understand the paperless default
correctly, you're not using paperless's OCR. It only performs OCR on
PDFs that do not already have text already recognized.

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j0hnp0s · 2023-11-01 20:17

You don t need OCR with paperless ngx as the others have said.

What you need is a good app that eliminates any geometrical
distortion, has enough dpi to help ocr (400-600 depending on font
size) and proper lighting to eliminate background gradients that might
interfere with the b/w conversion done by most ocrs

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[deleted] · 2023-12-19 14:11

[removed]