Looks promising—thanks for sharing! Is it possible to include non-Python binaries somehow? Similar to how it is done with PyInstaller with the --add-binary argument?
P.S.: It has already been mentioned, but I also find the "cowsay" example more confusing than informative. "cowsay" isn't even written in Python, but in Perl, isn't it? Maybe a simple hello-world.py example would work better :)
As others mentioned, Tesseract is SOTA in FOSS OCR. It also still is being developed, improving slow but constantly.
The main issue for a use-case like NormCap are the trained models: they are optimized for images of _printed_ text and layouts, which is different from on-screen-text in many aspects. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to train my own models.
Cuneiform was a long time competitor, but afaik development there is stalled.
I agree, there are way better cloud based and proprietary OCR solutions out there. But Tesseract still seems to deliver the best results among the FOSS tools, doesn't it?
Back in the days, Cuneiform got close to Tesseract's performance, but AFAIK it wasn't developed further...
Does anyone else know other promising open-source OCR engines?
It even could work offline, cache/store data and send it when back online.