 I built a new tool: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr - it runs OCR against images and PDFs entirely in your browser (no file upload needed) using Tesseract.js and PDF.js I wrote more about the tool and how I built it (with copious amounts of Claude 3 Opus and a little bit of ChatGPT) here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ 18 comments
@molly0xfff Yes! I first used something like this for the alt text in my annotated presentation tool here: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/annotated-presentations  @simon Very cool. Though I get a Heroku error when I try to go to your site ("Application error: An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail") @aaronjschaffer Huh... it looks like it's the Mastodon effect, where sending out a link causes thousands of Mastodon servers to all hit /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:simon@simonwillison.net at the same time - but I've survived these storms just fine in the past, not sure why it's hurting the site today @aaronjschaffer Worked through it here, should be working OK again now https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/issues/415   @simon need more such browser-only, offline-first, privacy-first apps that don't require any installation or configuration! @prem_k @simon If you didn't see it at the time, this was quite a cool offline browser-based transcription tool posted a few weeks back: https://bne.social/@simon/112057608292224084 Like you, I love these kinds of tools but if I could *beg* the authors for one feature - please make it easy to download the needed files so I can run it all truly offline :) @StuartGray @prem_k That really is a worthwhile feature for this one, I've opened an issue - no promises I'll solve it though, there are things in there relating to bundling that I don't know how to do yet https://github.com/simonw/tools/issues/2 Something I really like about this tool is that the entire thing is 226 lines of combined HTML, CSS and JavaScript (plus the PDF.js and Tesseract.js dependencies, loaded from a CDN) The code is a little untidy but at 226 lines it honestly doesn't matter https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9fb049424f4ec8f8ffb91a59ab7111cad56088fc/ocr.html Also neat is that the enabling libraries here - Tesseract.js and PDF.js - are both pretty old at this point: First commit to Tesseract.js was Jun 26, 2015 https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/commit/906ce3cadbffaf5f7317a4418f282c4b78bf8385 First to PDF.js was Apr 25, 2011 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/commit/6dc1770bba7a417ce5664c0305469e5bb7ea76bd   @simon not sure if this is of interest to @jbaiter , cf. https://openbiblio.social/@jbaiter/110815957206638047 |
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@simon nice! i was thinking of trying to do something similar to autogenerate alt text, which i currently tend to do by opening images in chrome and using google lens (far too many clicks)