It doesn't need to be Python. Tesseract is what I ended up using, IIRC. But I was looking for a turnkey package that would work from beginning to end. I wasn't

It doesn't need to be Python. Tesseract is what I ended up using, IIRC. But I was looking for a turnkey package that would work from beginning to end. I wasn't doing anything unusual, and my app wasn't OCR-focused. I just wanted easy drop-in OCR for documents. Tesseract is more like getting a pretty good motor for free (recognizing text), but it's up to you to build the rest of the car around it (preprocessing images, handling errors, dealing with the output, potentially training it to your task, and various other issues).