[madisonmay]

pypdfium2 is a great choice and a solid piece of software!

You might want to look into https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya as an alternative to tesseract. Yes, it's associated with a commercial company, but as you long as you aren't a company with 5M in ARR or $5M in funding it's free to use.

[pzo]

this still seems GPL. another OCR worth considering is easyOCR [0] (apache license). AFAIK there is not layout detection but they do provide bounding boxes and support many languages also detecting text on many different world objects from images (signpost, etc)

[0] https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR

[nhirschfeld]

Yup, easy OCR is good.

My reasons for using Tesseract - easy OCR is larger, and it has a significant cold start.

It benchmarks better for many OCR tasks though, so I'm thinking of adding it as an alternative backend.

[cdrini]

Where did you find benchmarks for OCR tools? There have been so many OCR engines coming lately, I would love to see benchmarks!

[nhirschfeld]

I google this for a while...

[alex_suzuki]

Any experience with Paddle OCR? https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Personally I‘ve used Tesseract before but the results were underwhelming, so I‘m curious how Paddle OCR performs in comparison.

[nhirschfeld]

I haven't, testing it out is on my todo list for sure

[nhirschfeld]

interesting!