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

My other OCR project from yesterday: textract-cli, the thinnest possible CLI wrapper around AWS's Textract API, built out of frustration at how hard that is to use!

https://github.com/simonw/textract-cli

It only works with JPEGs and PNGs up to 5MB in size, reflecting limitations in Textract’s synchronous API - anything more than that has to go to S3 first.

Assuming you’ve configured AWS credentials already, this is all you need to know:

pipx install textract-cli
textract-cli image.jpeg > output.txt

New feature for my browser-based OCR tool: you can now select the Tesseract.js language to use, from a list of 102 options

https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr

One tiny extra detail which possibly only I care about: changing the selection in the language select now updates a ?language=x query string, so you can bookmark a language and the back/forward buttons navigate through that selected state

Here's OCR for Welsh, bookmarked: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr?language=cym

Anyone get any documents lying around in Middle Ages French, circa 1400-1600?

Apparently Tesseract / Tesseract.js can handle them, so I'd love to see my tool try!

https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr?language=frm