Show HN: Local-first fast CPU image to text for screenshots, PDFs, webpages

17 comments

• KetoManx64 a day ago

  What's the performance like compared to tesseract? I don't see tesseract mentioned anywhere in the readme, which is surprising considering that's the number one tool most go to for Image > text OCR.

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  • mrkn1 a day ago

    No rigorous eval, and I love Tesseract. Here's the example that motivated me to build textsnap (which is in the github's README), parsed with Tesseract:

    https://imgur.com/a/i2eQra8

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    • KetoManx64 a day ago

      Very noticable difference and the exact issue I run repeatedly with tesseract! Definitely going to try dropping textsnap into my scripts now. Thanks!!

• lavaman131 a day ago

  This is awesome! Been needing something like this for some research paper diagrams I've been indexing.

• abstract257 2 days ago

  Curious how it does on multi-page scanned PDFs vs. single screenshots? The ORT vision/decoder split is the part that usually makes or breaks CPU VLM OCR...

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  • krunck 2 days ago

    I had to extract the image from a PDF for it to work. Then run it on each page image extracted.

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    • abstract257 a day ago

      Thanks

• vivzkestrel 2 days ago

  - how well do you think this ll work with code? i mean take code screenshots and convert it into actual code for vscode

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  • mrkn1 2 days ago

    Just ran

      textsnap "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LBNDfxjEYlA/maxresdefault.jpg"
    

    and got this

      $('.count').each(function () {
      $('this').prop('Counter', 0).animate({
        Counter: $('this').text()
      }, {
          duration: 4000,
          easing: 'swing',
          step: 'function (now) {
              $('this").text(Math.ceil(now));
          }
        }); 
      });

• monosma 2 days ago

  What was the reason for adopting PaddleOCR? Can other OCR models be used as well?

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  • mrkn1 2 days ago

    No reason other than their Q4 model working reasonably well and fast on my CPU laptop. Should work with any ONNX VLM model

• kouru225 2 days ago

  Roman alphabet only or does this work with other alphabets?

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  • mrkn1 2 days ago

    109 languages, including other alphabets.

• garrett2558 2 days ago

  Very cool, I'm building my own local-first product as well

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  • mrkn1 2 days ago

    thank you! what is it about?

• BIGFOOT_EXISTS 2 days ago

  Now this is legit cool, keep up the great work.

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  • mrkn1 2 days ago

    thank you!