> How is this different from tesseract and friends?
The workflow is for digitizing historical printed documents. Think conserving old announcements in blackletter typesetting, not extracting info from typewritten business documents.
The workflow is for digitizing historical printed documents. Think conserving old announcements in blackletter typesetting, not extracting info from typewritten business documents.
I was surprised that even scraped screen text did not work 100% flawlessly in tesseract. Maybe it was not made for that, but still, I had a lot of problems with high resolution photos also. I did not try scanned documents, though.
In the mid 2010s I put Tesseract, OCRad (which is decidedly not state of the art), and aspell into a pretty effective text processing pipeline to transform resumes into structured documents. The commercial solutions we looked at (at the time) were a little slower and about as good. If the spellcheck came back with too low of a success rate I ran the document through OCRad which, while simplistic, sometimes did a better job.
I expect the results today with more modern projects to be much better so I probably wouldn’t go that path again. However as all of it runs nicely on slow hardware, it likely still has a place on low power/hobby grade IoT boards and other niches.