Hi! I was wondering about the best methods used currently to fully digitize a scanned book rather than adding an OCR layer to a scanned image.
I was thinking of a tool that first does a quick scan of the file to OCR the text and preserve images and then flags low-confidence OCR results to allow humans to review it and make quick corrections then outputting a digital structured text file (like an epub) instead of a searchable bitmap image with a text layer.
I’d prefer an open-sourced solution or at the very least one with a reasonably-priced option for individuals that want to use it occasionally without paying an expensive business subscription.
If no such tool exists what is used nowadays for cleaning up/preprocessing scanned images and applying OCR while keeping the final file as light and compressed as possible? The solution I've tried (ilovepdf ocr) ends up turning a 100MB file into a 600MB one and the text isn't even that accurate.
I know that there's software for adding OCR (like Tesseract, OCRmyPDF, Acrobat, and FineReader) and programs to compress the PDF, but I wanted to hear some opinions from people who have already done this kind of thing before wasting time trying every option available to know what will give me the best results in 2025.