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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

Tesseract has had a near 100% success rate since the first time I used it in 2008 _when you read the manual_.

Black letters on white background, xheight of between 10 to 30 px, tiff format, mono column layout, etc., etc., etc..

People get terrible results because they treat it like a phone app and drop a barely legible colored jpg of a bent page and wonder why it's garbage.

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Reading the manual to actually tune it or reading the manual to know the limitations?

All I've ever tried it for is pixel perfect super high contrast text but still the results doesn't exactly impress.

Sure, if you're generating the input to be machine readable, then it's not very surprising that it's machine readable withough much effort. But then you could also use a QR code. Most people who want to OCR stuff are doing it because they don't have control over the input.

what you are saying is that tesseract works perfectly if you don't need to use it with real world stuff

My read is that he is saying that Tesseract is intended for OCR, not an entire image pipeline, so there is an expectation that you will preprocess those real world images into a certain form rather than throwing an image straight off the sensor at it.

They wonder why it's garbage because modern apps have set people's expectations much higher.

A barely legible colored jpg of a bent page shouldn't be a problem anymore.

It works better than those apps when you know what you are doing.

Not everything needs to be made for a chimp.

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