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Simon - hope you don't mind me commenting on you in third person in relation to the above. Simon is a great explainer, but I wish he would credit the underlying

Simon - hope you don't mind me commenting on you in third person in relation to the above. Simon is a great explainer, but I wish he would credit the underlying technology or library (like tesseract.js) a bit more upfront, like you. It matters in this case because for tesseract, the exact model is incredibly important. For example, v4 is pretty bad (but what is available on most linux distros when ran serverside) whereas v5 is decent. So I would have had a more accurate interest in this post if it was a bit more upfront that "Tesseract.js lets you run OCR against PDFs fairly quickly now, largely because of better processors we as devs have, not because of any real software change in the last 2-3 years". I felt this before for his NLP content too - but clearly it works because he's such a great explainer and one for teasing content later that you do read it! I must say I've never been left confused by Simons work.

simonw 3y ago
I was pretty careful to credit Tesseract.js - it's linked at the top of the tool itself https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr and prominently in the article I wrote: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ What else should I have done?
- kuschkufan 3y ago
  It's all subjective. Reading your linked blog made it perfectly clear for me you built this using tesseract.js. No idea what the other guys are complaining about.
- authorfly 3y ago
  I drafted a few longer responses about the feeling that I had after reading your post after that headline but they were a bit unavoidably asshole-y! So really, just something like "with Tesseract.js" in the headline is all I would think could be helpful to people on sites like HN. I do like your writing. But I do enjoy knowing what I'm reading specifically if possible, when it's tech.

simonw 3y ago

I was pretty careful to credit Tesseract.js - it's linked at the top of the tool itself https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr and prominently in the article I wrote: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ What else should I have done?

kuschkufan 3y ago
It's all subjective. Reading your linked blog made it perfectly clear for me you built this using tesseract.js. No idea what the other guys are complaining about.
authorfly 3y ago
I drafted a few longer responses about the feeling that I had after reading your post after that headline but they were a bit unavoidably asshole-y! So really, just something like "with Tesseract.js" in the headline is all I would think could be helpful to people on sites like HN. I do like your writing. But I do enjoy knowing what I'm reading specifically if possible, when it's tech.