I have a rather old and battered book which contains an essay by Dorothy Sayers that I rather like. The pages are yellowing, and the print quality is poor, so I decided to try and resurrect my favourite essay into a modern format. The steps were Scan each page of the document with xsane . The qua…

Hi Neville, :waving_hand: congratulations on your achievements. :clap: [image] Neville Jackson: The quality was poor, […] As you can see it is ‘noisy’. It gets letters wrong, puts an accent over ‘e’, and inserts punctuation that is not there. So the poor scan qualtity is to be blamed for …

[image] Rosika Schreck: So the poor scan qualtity is to be blamed for the “noisy” output provided by tesseract, if I understood you correctly Hi Rosika, I think so. The original book pages are damaged… yellowed and specs of dirt. I did not try a higher resolution scan. I did not try to u…

Hi Neville, :waving_hand: [image] Neville Jackson: The original book pages are damaged… yellowed and specs of dirt Yes, I can imagine that would give tesseract a hard time dealing with them correctly. [image] Neville Jackson: It was good enough to get my job done… with some hand editing…

Thank you. I downloaded it from your github docs. Sheila

I may fiddle with this at some point too.

[image] Neville Jackson: are allowed to take one copy for private use I believe you can do just that as long as its not for sale or profit. But not sure about a whole book, it used to be a set percent of the book, but that may vary from different countries How much of a book can I …

[image] Paul: Looks like 10 % Thanks , that would cover it There is no copyright notice in the book, but I would like to play it safe. and what I have made public is not copy… it is a modified digital representation. I modified the presentation, not the words. There is an acknowledgement o…

[image] pdecker: I may fiddle with this at some point too I feel one could improve it with some image processing before using tesseract eg filter out any speckle

[image] Neville Jackson: I feel one could improve it with some image processing before using tesseract I tried a denoise filter in gimp, before using tesseract. It improved the txt output, but still not perfect raw image → tesseract THE GREAT. MYSTERY. its'for it-is what God wants for'us:…

I made a good job with www ilovepdf. They have a pdf to ocr tool and it identified perfectly that my text had two columns and the title and page numbers at the top of the page. Maybe running a tool to verify the english would help to correct some common ocr mistakes such as i/j etc. Are there somet…

OCR with tesseract in Linux

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nevj (Neville Jackson) 24 October 2025 08:49 12

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