Dear List members,

The new drag-and-drop interface to Google Vision OCR that I mentioned last month is now ready for use on Skrutable. Go straight to the new subpage skrutable.info/ocr, or look for the small link on the main page, lower-left. The FAQs should answer most questions and get you up and running in a few minutes.

Many thanks to those who provided detailed feedback! (Arushi, Don, Herman, Jan, Patrick, Vyom—apologies if others are slipping my mind today.) It helped me equip the tool with a number of usability features and provide detailed instructions, especially to hopefully de-scarify Google Billing. That said, I'll happily make further improvements as needed.

Finally, I learned the great news last week that Dharmamitra may also soon release a very similar drag-and-drop interface for OCR with Google Gemini, with no billing setup needed. In my recent tests, Gemini and Cloud Vision each produce strong results, but they make different errors, suggesting that combining their outputs could yield the best accuracy. For that use case, I happen to have another side-project prototype that could prove useful, which I'll keep tinkering on.

Here for any and all questions, of course!

Kind wishes,
Tyler

On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 3:02 PM Tyler Neill <tyler.g.neill@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,

Regarding Patrick’s question about easy OCR, I suspect he’s particularly looking for a tool that can handle multi-page PDFs in one go, which could be especially helpful for digitization projects like UTA’s Resource Library for Dharmaśāstra Studies.

If Patrick or anyone else is interested, feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m looking for a few volunteers to test a new drag-and-drop interface I’m building to streamline access to Google Vision OCR, which is currently best in class and handles multi-page inputs well.

Kind regards,
Tyler

On Sat, May 10, 2025 at 8:00 AM <indology-request@list.indology.info> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Patrick Olivelle <jpo@austin.utexas.edu>
To: Indology <indology@list.indology.info>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 22:07:05 +0000
Subject: [INDOLOGY] OCR
Dear Friends:

I am wondering whether with the advance of AI technology we have easy OCR software to read Devanāgarī, easy enough to be used by someone like me!! We have the one prepared by Andrew Ollett, which he generously gave us. But that requires computer knowledge far beyond my reach. Is there on where you can just drop the Devanāgari scan, out pops a searchable file. This is probably a long shot, but I thought I would ask.

With thanks and best wishes,

Patrick Olivelle