sanskrit ocr down?

[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

https://ocr.sanskritdictionary.com is down since atleast yesterday. Are there alternatives where I can directly paste screenshots without needing to save as files?

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Vishvas /विश्वासः

[Martin Gluckman]

Should be up now!

[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

Also dharmamitra has (a currently less convenient interface). Also -

Tyler Neill tyler.g.neill at gmail.com
Mon May 12 19:02:23 UTC 2025

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Hi all,

Regarding Patrick’s question about easy OCR, I suspect he’s particularly
looking for a tool that can handle multi-page PDFs in one go, which could
be especially helpful for digitization projects like UTA’s Resource Library
for Dharmaśāstra Studies
<https://sites.utexas.edu/sanskrit/resources/dharmasastra/>.

If Patrick or anyone else is interested, feel free to reach out to me
directly. I’m looking for a few volunteers to test a new drag-and-drop
interface I’m building to streamline access to Google Vision OCR, which is
currently best in class and handles multi-page inputs well.

Kind regards,
Tyler

[Anunad Singh]

Multi-page PDFs can be OCRed in some other ways too-

1) There are many online tools available to convert PDF files into text, doc, markdown etc. 

2) create a notebook in google colab for doing that. I have made such a notebook and converted some pdf files into text. 

It should be noted that google colab provides hardware (RAM, storage space, CPUs, GPUs, TPUs), software (python libraries etc), environment, good interface and even an AI agent for creating/correcting code automatically.

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[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2025 at 20:42, Anunad Singh <anu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Multi-page PDFs can be OCRed in some other ways too-

1) There are many online tools available to convert PDF files into text, doc, markdown etc. 

often with limitations on number of pages etc.. what's the best in your experience?

 

2) create a notebook in google colab for doing that. I have made such a notebook and converted some pdf files into text. 

share it here.

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sanskrit-programmers/CACa%2Bt%3DOc%2BXrMdTm0w%3DHJ-XriuFxiNf1%3DYih_HFQRHUPtFqWZgQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Anunad Singh]

Yes, there is a limitation on max number of pages. I do not remember the exact limit.

Please find attached the  notebook (hindi_pdf_to_text_conversion.ipynb) .

-- anunAda

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sanskrit-programmers/CAFY6qgFf7qVi%3DtkLNke0BhJiUdiPvb1njNt0LKLp25ZxtKn0aw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Shreevatsa R]

I took a quick look at the notebook in the previous message (here's a direct link to the notebook uploaded to Colab) — it runs Tesseract on the PDF and downloads a .txt file.

Alternatively, note that Tesseract can also be run in the browser:

- https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr is a webpage that does this

- https://chaya.shreevatsa.net/ is an adaption I was working on at some point (I plan to replace it with something rather different when I next get the time, but will have a link to this from here)

- Tyler Neill (cc-ed) was also planning to build something better (as quoted above) and may already have it

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sanskrit-programmers/CACa%2Bt%3DOaWhx0TzWNC5_PZ%2B2jTmbgAex_sX71vX5xEN0tC_UV-A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Tyler Neill]

Hi all,

Yes, I just launched that yesterday (Google Cloud Vision, individual billing required). And so too did Sebastian launch a nearly identical service on Dharmamitra (Google Gemini, billing covered by grant money). Big day for OCR!

Copying messages on Indology list below. In general, would it help to cross-post such announcements on BV-Parishat (I recently joined) and/or this list? I’m not sure how much cross-pollination happens naturally through shared membership.

Kind regards,

Tyler

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tyler Neill <tyler....@gmail.com>
To: indology@list.indology.info
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:41:45 -0400
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] OCR

Dear List members,

The new drag-and-drop interface to Google Vision OCR that I mentioned last month is now ready for use on Skrutable. Go straight to the new subpage skrutable.info/ocr, or look for the small link on the main page, lower-left. The FAQs should answer most questions and get you up and running in a few minutes.

Many thanks to those who provided detailed feedback! (Arushi, Don, Herman, Jan, Patrick, Vyom—apologies if others are slipping my mind today.) It helped me equip the tool with a number of usability features and provide detailed instructions, especially to hopefully de-scarify Google Billing. That said, I'll happily make further improvements as needed.

Finally, I learned the great news last week that Dharmamitra may also soon release a very similar drag-and-drop interface for OCR with Google Gemini, with no billing setup needed. In my recent tests, Gemini and Cloud Vision each produce strong results, but they make different errors, suggesting that combining their outputs could yield the best accuracy. For that use case, I happen to have another side-project prototype that could prove useful, which I'll keep tinkering on.

Here for any and all questions, of course!

Kind wishes,

Tyler

On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 3:02 PM Tyler Neill <tyler....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Regarding Patrick’s question about easy OCR, I suspect he’s particularly looking for a tool that can handle multi-page PDFs in one go, which could be especially helpful for digitization projects like UTA’s Resource Library for Dharmaśāstra Studies.

If Patrick or anyone else is interested, feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m looking for a few volunteers to test a new drag-and-drop interface I’m building to streamline access to Google Vision OCR, which is currently best in class and handles multi-page inputs well.

Kind regards,

Tyler

On Sat, May 10, 2025 at 8:00 AM <indology-request@list.indology.info> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Patrick Olivelle <j...@austin.utexas.edu>
To: Indology <indology@list.indology.info>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 22:07:05 +0000
Subject: [INDOLOGY] OCR
Dear Friends:

I am wondering whether with the advance of AI technology we have easy OCR software to read Devanāgarī, easy enough to be used by someone like me!! We have the one prepared by Andrew Ollett, which he generously gave us. But that requires computer knowledge far beyond my reach. Is there on where you can just drop the Devanāgari scan, out pops a searchable file. This is probably a long shot, but I thought I would ask.

With thanks and best wishes,

Patrick Olivelle

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sebastian Nehrdich <nehr...@gmail.com>
To: Indology List <indology@list.indology.info>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:16:01 -0700
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Dharmamitra Updates regarding OCR and Chrome Extension

Dear List members, 

I am pleased to announce several significant updates to the Dharmamitra platform that will be of interest to researchers in our field.

New OCR Capabilities  As Tyler Neill mentioned, Dharmamitra now features fast OCR processing powered by the Gemini engine. Users can upload PDF files up to 100MB in size, with automatic conversion to IAST or Wylie transliteration if needed. We are also working on our own specialized OCR engine for Sanskrit. 

Enhanced Translation Tools The platform's translator now includes an "upload image" input option, allowing researchers to move directly from screenshots of texts to translations. 

Updated Chrome Extension We have significantly overhauled our Google Chrome extension, which can be found here. The chrome extension makes it possible to use Dharmamitra seamlessly when browsing GRETIL etexts, BuddhaNexus, DSBC etc. 

These developments aim to facilitate the work of translators and philological researchers. 

We extend our gratitude to the Tsadra Foundation for their significant support in making these advances possible.

Best regards,

Sebastian 

[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 at 00:56, Tyler Neill <tyler....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Yes, I just launched that yesterday (Google Cloud Vision, individual billing required).

How about adding a Google drive based front-end like https://ocr.sanskritdictionary.com ? (the redundancy would help when the latter is down).

 

And so too did Sebastian launch a nearly identical service on Dharmamitra (Google Gemini, billing covered by grant money). Big day for OCR!

Copying messages on Indology list below. In general, would it help to cross-post such announcements on BV-Parishat (I recently joined) and/or this list? I’m not sure how much cross-pollination happens naturally through shared membership.

Posts of relevance to sanskrit-programmers are very welcome here. Generally, Indology, BVP and this list have big non-intersections.

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sanskrit-programmers/CADbR%2BY9O7eKuye%2BN5gOOBToRpvVzak71-s%2Bf2nTqk7w%3D0kDEBQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Anunad Singh]

Thank you Shreevatsa ji.

I have some more things to add in this regard. Almost 60% of the online free pdf to text converters do NOT have OCR capability for Devanagari.

Regarding the notebook for free conversion of Devanagari pdf to text, I first tried to do the complete process with PyMuPDF alone. But the text output was much inferior than what I got using PyMuPDF + tesseract after this.

-- अनुनाद 

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