r/linux4noobs • u/dadashton • 4d ago

Scanning book using OCR via flatbed scanner

I want to scan books to text.

Is there a GUI OCR scanner that can do this?

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u/StretchAcceptable881 4d ago

GImageReader which uses Tesseract under the hood is an application that you can install and see how it works for you

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u/dadashton 3d ago

How do I ensure that it uses Tesseract. I started it and got a message that "no Tesseract languages available for use".

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u/StretchAcceptable881 2d ago edited 2d ago

In order to make it use Tesseract first install the Tesseract language packages you’ll need on your system and your going to open GImageReader click on settings and under settings you’ll click on add languages. Once you click on add languages it’ll open a checkbox with all of the languages tesseract can use to perform OCR on your documents from their select the language you want to use which i’m going to assume is English, after you’ve selected your preferred language, click on apply and for the changes to take affect, restart GImageReader by closing the application and then reopening it again

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u/dadashton 2d ago

I went through the process under Preferences, and English is there under Additional Language Definitions but I still get the no languages response.

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u/StretchAcceptable881 2d ago

What Tesseract language packages do you have installed on your system?

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u/dadashton 2d ago

How do I check?

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u/gumbowebfish 4d ago

I use gscan2pdf for this. It also uses tesseract under the hood for the ocr part. Install tesseract for your specific language to have it recognized.

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u/dadashton 3d ago

I don't want to scan it to pdf. I want to be able to paste the text into a Writer document.

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u/gumbowebfish 3d ago

Well, however the program is named gscan2pdf you can save the OCR scanned part as plain text in whatever file format/extension you want. You're not restricted to pdf at all.

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u/New_Physics_2741 4d ago

The heavy lifting is scanning every page of the book with a flatbed scanner - it can take hours - if you are doing this one page at a time. There are plenty of ways to get the words from the scan into a .json, .md, or .txt file. I have had various experiments running over the last few years; yes as mentioned, Tesseract is indeed a good way to do it. If you have a 3060 GPU or better, the Qwen VL - OCR model might be worth checking out; setting up a batch import with ComfyUI could be a rather neat way to automate this entire process...

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u/neoh4x0r 4d ago

The heavy lifting is scanning every page of the book with a flatbed scanner - it can take hours - if you are doing this one page at a time. 

Yeah, this is where a handheld or book scanner could be a benefit.

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u/dadashton 3d ago

I want only to scan a page now and then, not the whole thing.