I would not expect tesseract to recognize handwritten stuff with any accuracy.
OCR technology has been around a long time as it was developed by the industry as a bridge technology to go from 100% paper office workflows to 100% electronic workflows. At one time it was very important but it's importance has fallen drastically. This is why major vendors like HP and Google have abandoned projects like Tesseract, because OCR is becoming a niche tool. With IT technology niche tools tend to increase in cost, and attract proprietary solutions that then tend to drive standards-based solutions out of the market, because the proprietary stuff is better. This then stimulates businesses (who are the source of funding of these tools) to look for alternative solutions. Many find them which then further shrinks the niche market, driving prices up further, stimulating even more people to abandon them - well you get the picture. This is why for example Tungsten was able to buy up all those companies. They recognized it would be possible to monopolize this hybrid paper/electronic workflow market because there WOULD be a small percentage of businesses who absolutely would not let go of hybrid paper workflows until you pried them from their cold, dead, fingers. The only reason I could get away with using AMC is because when you are doing surveys you want to deliberately anonymize them so I don't need to collect names, addresses, etc. If we HAD to collect names and addresses we would have used cheap tablets and a website with forms then handed the person the tablet. Other than that, I can't really advise you other than to say it's not likely we are going to see open source handwriting recognition that is free, since it's going to require access to a pretty powerful AI engine to do it. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of VY Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 6:23 PM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] document scanner >Both tesseract or the python libs can recognize the printed questions but >handle very poorly on the hand-writing words. I suspect maybe my phone >>camera is not "good enough" even though it is advertised to be 50MP. On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 6:02 AM Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote: > Followup on the "handwritten forms" > > If you are able to convert these forms into a multiple-choice form > that people fill in boxes by hand, instead of writing actual words on > them, I can Tell you how to convert these into actual data output. At > my office we have this customer satisfaction survey thing that we do > periodically, and > For a zillion unrelated reasons it has to be handed out on paper. The > department doing it was wringing their hands over this as it would > take Hours and hours and hours for some poor soul to go through all of > the forms and input the results into a spreadsheet. > > I looked into commercial products that do this - and there's only 1 > company out there that sells software nowadays for this - Tungsten > Automation. These turkeys have been spending the last decade buying > up every company in the "hybrid paper workflows" market and they now > have a complete monopoly on it - and literally they sell complete > systems, they no longer sell standalone software that does forms > conversions. Pricing is quote-only and it's in the low 5 figures. > > I found an open source software program for this and built a system > around it - so now, they just feed the 300 or so paper surveys into > the hopper in a scanner like what I just linked to, and all the > resulting PDF's get fed into the system and the data is then loaded > into a MariaDB database. I then took their Excel spreadsheet and > converted it into a front end using the ODBC drivers for MariaDB. Works > slick saves hours of drudgery. > > Anyway, this is only good for multiple choice click box forms that > people fill out by hand. For OCR of cursive or handwritten printing - > good effing luck. > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of VY > Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 4:47 AM > To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help, civil and on-topic < > [email protected]> > Subject: [PLUG] document scanner > > Dear All > > I am looking for a good document scanner that is Linux compatible. > Better yet if it is Raspberry Pi compatible. > > I have a bunch of forms that have hand writing on them. I will be getting > them on a regular basis and I like to scan them and convert them to > high-resolution PDFs. > > Any pointer for such a scanner is much appreciated. > > -Vincent > >
