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OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#22Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
I've seen papers using fine-tuned small local vision models to transcribe math into latex. Personally I tried Claude Opus & Claude Code directly to do this. It works (to my surprise) but AI sometimes take guesses that are mathematically right but deviates with my original writing. There is no 100% correct method though.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#23Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
I've seen papers using fine-tuned small local vision models to transcribe math into latex. Personally I tried Claude Opus & Claude Code directly to do this. It works (to my surprise) but AI sometimes take guesses that are mathematically right but deviates with my original writing. There is no 100% correct method though.
> take guesses that are mathematically right but deviates with my original writing.
Its rather interesting if it's correcting a mistake or picking a correct alternative.
How accurate do you think it is overall?
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#24Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
I tested many open-source and hosted OCR models and Datalab Chandra was the most accurate. It can parse complex layouts, tables, handwriting, and formulas at a fraction of the cost of Claude/Gemini.
Local: https://github.com/datalab-to/chandra Hosted: https://www.datalab.to
Another decent option is GLM OCR. It's slightly less accurate but faster and cheaper.
Local: https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-OCR Hosted: https://docs.z.ai/guides/vlm/glm-ocr
Other models such as PaddleOCR, dots.ocr and DeepSeek OCR performed significantly worse.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#25Love how this is just a chrome extension... Just made an API so that you could easily OCR everything with SOTA results (using finetuned VLM) at 1/3rd of the usual costs... Would absolutely love to chat and see if we can help out !
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#26Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
I, at this point, use Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for most of the small OCR I want to do. It is much much better than my experience with Tesseract in general. The nice thing about it is that if you give it, say, a movie poster you can ask for the "title of the movie" and it will, to the best of its ability, do just that, no need for regex or filtering after. For smallish images after loading the 3B model runs in I might be a bit behind, all of this is from early this year for the most part, but for something like "I have 3000 movie posters and I want to get the titles with like 90% accuracy" it is good (much better than Tesseract), and it'll do that in like an hour.
EDIT: I guess one thing is Tesseract will kind of give gibberish back when it fails. The main issue with the LLMs are that instead they take a stab at it (like for a movie poster it'll give part of a quote, or a actor name) back. Makes knowing when it fails a little harder. As long as you have some way to verify when it is likely failing they are very good though.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#27Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
There's EasyOCR and RapidOCR too, I guess benchmark and see what's best for your material? Oh and Multimodal LLMs :)
Being using granite model pretty small and good. Can't do JSON, but don't really care.
Which models are EasyOCR and RapidOCR using?
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#28Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
Definitely not. Even Chrome has a built in OCR that performs amazingly. I got an LLM to write a quick python wrapper to it [1], so I'm sure you should be able to access it from an extension
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#29Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
PaddlePaddle (v6) is fantastic and fast
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#30Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
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