notes-on-optical-printer-technique/README.md

NOTES ON OPTICAL PRINTER TECHNIQUE

Reproduction on the guide written by Dennis Couzin. Loses some of the charm of the photocopied original floating around the internet, but this reproduction is done for the sake of readability/searchability of the text.

Tesseract does a majority of the heavy lifting, making about a 85% transcription with minor changes needed to spelling and slightly more effort formatting it into markdown for rendering. Pre-processing using OpenCV and tuning tesseract for the typewritten font may produce even better text.

Preserving alternate spellings not created in the OCR process.

PDF + HTML Dependencies

• pandoc
• wkhtmltopdf

bash compile.sh 

Text extraction dependencies

• Python3.7
• OpenCV 2
• Tesseract
• PIL
• PyMuPDF

cd extract
python3 pdf.py > ../ocr/pdf_output.txt
python3 ocr.py > ../ocr/tesseract_output.txt