alt Hacker NewsI don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020.
My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
Replies
petercooper • today at 4:48 PM
Quite, I threw a so-so photo of an old, long receipt at Qwen 3.5 0.8MB (runs in <2GB) and it nailed spitting 20+ items out in under a second. AI is good at many things, but picking modern dependencies not so much.
mettamage • today at 1:54 PM
Painful comparison haha
Leaving a comment so I can more easily find this
And for the people wondering about Pandas, use Polars instead
I was surprised to learn (from this article) that there are local models that can do this (not sure if there are any that run on hardware I actually have though, unlike Tesseract which works fine on the scanning hardware I set up for it ~5 years ago.) For privacy reasons, cloud-based OCR is a non-starter...