Life & fun · December 17, 2024
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 launched on December 17, 2024 with 126 votes, #343 of 5,365 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.
In plain words
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 approximately 27,000 pages with extensive annotations and footnotes. The creator has documented technical approaches on a blog and made the partially completed results accessible through a web application, allowing readers to explore the digitized historical text.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
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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…
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- BVBenchmarking VLMs vs. Traditional OCR2025 · getomni.ai · ▲146
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:…
SNEWPapersApr 2026 · snewpapers.com · ▲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 >…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
