Open source handwriting OCR? (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by TrudeauCastroson@hexbear.net to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm looking for something that I can scan hand-written notes into and have OCR'd. Maybe one that I can even train on my handwriting. Ideally I end up with a searchable PDF of my notes.

People use one-note for this, but I'm not really comfortable with letting microsoft see my handwriting.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] mindlight@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago

To train an AI to recognize handwriting you need a huge dataset of handwriting examples. That is millions of samples of handwritten text + information about what the written text says in every example).

This is why the best engines only exists as a service in the cloud. The OCR engines you can install lovely that are acceptable, but far from perfect, are commercial. Parascript FormXtra is one of the better commercial ones.

The only OCR Engine that's free and really good is Tesseract OCR but it doesn't handle handwritten text.