Mathpix PDF search is fully visually powered and does not use underlying PDF metadata, even working on handwriting. It’s a great choice for researchers (especially in STEM) who want to build a searchable archive of PDFs.
Amazon Textract does a phenomenal job of extracting text from dodgy scanned PDFs - I've been running it against scanned typewritten text and even handwritten journal text from the 1880s with great results.
Textract really does do a good job of balancing cost, ease of use, and quality, at least for my hobbyist needs.
I was inspired by another recent comment you posted on HN, and after some testing of the Textract console [0] I wrote a simple "local only" command-line version [1] (Python, boto3) that does similar things to your tool.
I used my tool to OCR a few hundred comic strip images I've been meaning to OCR for a while now - the service did beautifully where other tools I've tried in the past struggled with the handwritten text on the comics. Textract is fast enough that running serially was fine for a one-off without involving the more parallelized S3 workflow.
1. PDFSegmenter (in the notebook) - extract the images of the text (yup, it does images too)
2. An OCR Executor [0][1] from Jina Hub [2] to extract the text from the images
3. Actually splice the text chunks together to be what you'd expect - that's the tricky part. Even text splitting over pages can be tricky to reassemble properly. PDFs are a pain the butt frankly.
nicodjimenez|3 years ago
simonw|3 years ago
I built a tool for running OCR against every PDF in an S3 bucket (which costs about $1.50/thousand pages) here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/30/s3-ocr/
ydant|3 years ago
I was inspired by another recent comment you posted on HN, and after some testing of the Textract console [0] I wrote a simple "local only" command-line version [1] (Python, boto3) that does similar things to your tool.
I used my tool to OCR a few hundred comic strip images I've been meaning to OCR for a while now - the service did beautifully where other tools I've tried in the past struggled with the handwritten text on the comics. Textract is fast enough that running serially was fine for a one-off without involving the more parallelized S3 workflow.
[0] https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/textract/home?regio... [1] https://github.com/mbafford/textract-cli
alexcg1|3 years ago
1. PDFSegmenter (in the notebook) - extract the images of the text (yup, it does images too) 2. An OCR Executor [0][1] from Jina Hub [2] to extract the text from the images 3. Actually splice the text chunks together to be what you'd expect - that's the tricky part. Even text splitting over pages can be tricky to reassemble properly. PDFs are a pain the butt frankly.
[0] https://hub.jina.ai/executor/78yp7etm
[1] https://hub.jina.ai/executor/w4p7905v
[2] https://hub.jina.ai