101–110 of 122 posts
I have tried a bunch of things. This is what worked best for me: Surya [0]. It can run fully local on your laptop. I also tried EasyOCR [1], which is also quite good. I haven't tried this myself, but I will look at Paddle [2] if the previous two don't float your boat. All of these are OSS, and you don't need to pay a dime to anyone. [0]: https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya [1]: https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR […
I have tried a bunch of things. This is what worked best for me: Surya [0]. It can run fully local on your laptop. I also tried EasyOCR [1], which is also quite good. I haven't tried this myself, but I will look at Paddle [2] if the previous two don't float your boat. All of these are OSS, and you don't need to pay a dime to anyone. [0]: https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya [1]: https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR […
I have some out-of-print books that I want to convert into nice pdf's/epubs (like, reference-quality)
1) I don't mind destroying the binding to get the best quality. Any idea how I do so?
2) I have a multipage double-sided scanner (fujitsu scansnap). would this be sufficient to do the scan portion?
3) Is there anything that determines the font of the book text and reproduces that somehow? and that deals with things like bold and italic and applies that either as markdown output or what have you?
4) how do you de-paginate the raw text to reflow into (say) an epub or pdf format that will paginate based on the output device (page size/layout) specification?
ocrmypdf with some specific prompts, depending on the source (language, force, etc.) worked for me most of the time. The biggest issue for which I have not been able to find a solution yet, is proper conversion of pdf to epub. I read a lot on my phone, and the inflexibility of pdf format, with the ugliness of "reflow" as the only apparent option to give reading the look of true epub, on phones, is frustrating.
Copyright issues aside (e.g. if your thing is public domain), the galaxy-brain approach is to upload your raw scanned PDF to the Internet Archive (archive.org), fill in the appropriate metadata, wait about 24 hours for their post-upload format-conversion tasks to run automatically, and then download the size-optimized and OCR-ized PDF from them. I've done this with a few documents from the French and Spanish national…
If you want purely black and white output (e.g. if the PDF has yellowing pages and/or not-quite-black text, but doesn't have many illustrations), you can extract just the monochrome foreground layer from each page and ignore the color layers entirely.
First, extract the images using mutool extract in.pdf
Then delete the sRGB images.
Then combine the remaining images with imagemagick command line: convert -negate *.png out.pdf
This gives you a clean black and white PDF without any of the color information or artifacts from the background layer.
Here's a script that does all that. It worked with two different PDFs from IA. I haven't tested it with other sources of MRC PDFs. The script depends on mutool and imagemagick.
https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/44236eaeeca10398942d2c...