Sysadmin @lemmy.world The Bard in Green @lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 7 mo. ago

Best OCR software for a small business with a one time need?

Hello everyone.

I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database.

ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this.

I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

8 comments

PaperlessNGX
- Thanks for this suggestion, we're going to test it and see how it performs.
Depending on the quality of the scan a quick python script using tesseract might be enough. Probs examples online

the handwriting will be full of errors but spell check and an editing pass should be fine? I imagine you'll have to do that anyway
I've not used it but maybe https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/
- Thanks for this suggestion. We're going to test it and see how it performs.
This for a standalone desktop PC

https://www.openpaper.work/en/

Paperless-NGX for a painless server setup

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Mayan for enterprise server setup

https://www.mayan-edms.com/
Maybe try Marker, which uses AI stuff as part of their OCR process.

Stirling also support OCR using OCRmyPDF.

You can also use GPT4-V (e.g. via this library) to perform the OCR. It'll cost money though.
My company has gotten good results from Amazon Textract.

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