fodkodrasz 10 hours ago

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.

zihotki 10 hours ago

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 8 hours ago

    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

aidenn0 11 hours ago

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)

  • zihotki 10 hours ago

    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 3 hours ago

      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 3 hours ago

        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)

  • Elucalidavah 10 hours ago

    > Tesseract (which is the best I have so far)

    Have you looked at EasyOCR?

    • aidenn0 2 hours ago

      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 2 hours ago

        Have you tried Abbyy FineReader? It's the best OCR package I've seen.

Zardoz84 6 hours ago

If it would generate ALTO XML files... IF!

ranger_danger 13 hours ago

This is awesome. Only issue was I had to disable my JShelter extension because it would freeze the page using 100% CPU forever.