Show HN: OCR Workbench: AI OCR for hard documents

2 viking2917 0 5/13/2025, 7:06:11 PM github.com ↗

OCR on old documents is hard. OCR Workbench uses AI for OCR and provides an editing environment to clean things up, as is inevitably required.

Inspired by this Hacker News post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048698

Backstory: I was having trouble producing transcriptions of Colonial American documents, which have their own unique challenges for OCR, and things like Tesseract fail miserably. So I built something. Uses Gemini and seems to work pretty well (disclaimer: you need your own API key). I didn't build Claude but I expect it works similarly well.

FWIW: largely vibe coded, with human review and intervention as required.

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Show HN: OCR Workbench: AI OCR for hard documents

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