Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Adventures in OCR
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes…
Adventures in OCR is a project converting Saint-Simon's Memoirs, a 45-volume historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, into digital text using optical character recognition. The 1879-1930 edition contains… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Adventures in OCR launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2
DeepSeek-OCR▲350Advanced visual-text compression technology
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 3
A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer. I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras. This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place. [1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184
2025 · byte.tsundoku.io · its alternatives →
- 4
I think LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper. I built a system for Claude Code to browse 100 non-fiction books and find interesting connections between them. I started out with a pipeline in stages, chaining together LLM calls to build up a context of the library. I was mainly getting back the insight that I was baking into the prompts, and the results weren't particularly surprising. On a whim, I gave CC access to my debug CLI tools and found that it wiped the floor with that approach. It gave actually interesting results and required very little orchestration…
Jan 2026 · trails.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 5
Almost exactly 1 year ago, I submitted something to HN about using Llama2 (which had just come out) to improve the output of Tesseract OCR by correcting obvious OCR errors [0]. That was exciting at the time because OpenAI's API calls were still quite expensive for GPT4, and the cost of running it on a book-length PDF would just be prohibitive. In contrast, you could run Llama2 locally on a machine with just a CPU, and it would be extremely slow, but "free" if you had a spare machine lying around. Well, it's amazing how things have changed since then. Not only have models gotten a lot better,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
I built OCR Arena as a free playground for the community to compare leading foundation VLMs and open-source OCR models side-by-side. Upload any doc, measure accuracy, and (optionally) vote for the models on a public leaderboard. It currently has Gemini 3, dots.ocr, DeepSeek, GPT5, olmOCR 2, Qwen, and a few others. If there's any others you'd like included, let me know!
Nov 2025 · ocrarena.ai · its alternatives →
- 7BV
Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms. We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets. Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark Huggingface:…
2025 · getomni.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 9
SNEWPapers▲126Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities. Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper archives, but when I tried every service only lets you search for keywords and dates, and gives you back raw images of the papers, and too many of them with no context. A sea of noise. Solution: I taught machines how to read the newspapers and so far I've extracted the content from >…
Apr 2026 · snewpapers.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Find It▲141Search physical documents using your phone's camera 🔎
2018 · play.google.com · its alternatives →
- 12
This was not supposed to become a product. When PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 dropped, independent benchmarks put it at the top of document parsing models. I had to try it. I needed a provider, but there simply isn't one ready for production that I would trust. So i set one up myself. I assumed that even after getting it running, serving a vision-language model would be expensive. It turns out the opposite is true. Once I had it running properly, the cost was absurdly low. At proper GPU utilization, the cost is only around $1 per 1,000 pages. The nearest competitors are either much lower quality (Azure…
Jul 2026 · openparser.dev · its alternatives →
- 13
space ocr▲95OCR that checks its own answers, as an app or an API
Aug 2026 · space-ocr.com · its alternatives →
- 14
OCR.chat▲12Free online OCR. Convert images and PDFs to editable text, tables and LaTeX in 100+ languages, then chat with your document and get answers cited to the page. No signup to try.
Jun 2026 · ocr.chat · its alternatives →
- 15SV
Edit: Thank you so much for taking a look at Seen! Yes, I know, it's really slow. And scrolling does not render notes instantly. And the title is a bit clickbait-y. I'll try my best to improve on it though. This is just a preview, the most basic version of Seen, and it's getting there. But, oh God, I almost got a heart attack when I opened up Vercel Analytics and saw ~1,500 page views, up from 10 or 12. Thank you again! It's such a weird experience showing something to the world for the first time as a 16-year-old and seeing so many people look at it. Hello HN! I've been working on creating…
2025 · seen-v2.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 16PA
Hey everyone, I was wondering if a Poincaré disk would be able to usefully show the local structure of a graph while showing most of one I used a collection of ML papers to explore this
Mar 2026 · paperverse.net · its alternatives →
- 17YC
I just realized you can now open a PDF document in Firefox and select text directly from scanned images embedded in the document (so basically transparently reliable doing OCR). It is also surprisingly reliable, only sometimes mistaking a "oh" for a "zero" in a long string of numbers. I neither know when this was introduced nor who added this feature, but from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, you have made my daily life a lot easier. I also haven't really explored the limits of the feature and under what conditions it starts failing, but: in my daily workflow so far,…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 18
This project reconstructs the Epstein email records from the recent U.S. House Oversight Committee releases using only public-domain documents (23,124 image files + 2,800 OCR text files). Most email pages contain only one real message, buried under layers of repeated headers/footers. I wanted to rebuild the conversations without all the surrounding noise. I used an OCR + vision-LLM pipeline to extract individual messages from the email screenshots, normalize senders/recipients, rebuild timestamps, detect duplicates, and map threads. The output is a structured SQLite database that…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi everyone, For the past few months, I've been working on this project: an OCR API for ID cards. I think it's finally at a point where I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community. My main focus has been on reliability, especially for "edge-case" documents that often break other systems. I spent a lot of time specifically on Brazilian IDs to prove the model could handle high variance. This is still very much a work in progress, and I know there's a lot to improve. Your feedback would be invaluable in helping me figure out what to build next. You can try it out here (I've set up a…
Nov 2025 · 100ocrapi.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Kaizen OCR▲31Fully offline OCR with 100+ languages support. Full Privacy
2025 · kaizen-apps.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN: Recently I developed a simple OCR tool. The basic idea is that it can be used as a framework to help developers building and deploying their own OCR solutions. I hope it will be useful to you.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
TurboOCR, >200 img/s OmnidocBench. TensorRT FP16, PP-OCRv6, HTTP + gRPC - aiptimizer/TurboOCR
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23HT
Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!
2025 · tinysums.ai · its alternatives →
- 24
Neural network OCR. Contribute to mateogianolio/ocr development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp alternatives
- DeepSeek-OCR alternatives
- A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine alternatives
- I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books alternatives
- LLM-aided OCR – Correcting Tesseract OCR errors with LLMs alternatives
- OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →