alt Hacker NewsI think people misunderstand the utility of Mistral's OCR. It's not going to beat SOTA models for extraction on edge-case docs, but it's MUCH cheaper and faster and does an excellent job on simple ones. I've been working on converting PDFs to EPUBs and Mistral has been making steady improvements. On a chapter of Bleak House it was able to extract and tag the header, titles, and references at the bottom every time. The only thing it struggled on was line numbers in the right margin which it correctly tagged as "aside text" 3/5 times, but always separated from the core text each time. The important thing to keep in mind is that there's no prompting needed, just upload the PDF and voila!. There's even a batch mode with a 50% discount.
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> it's MUCH cheaper and faster and does an excellent job on simple ones.
OCR should be:
1. Privacy-respecting, i.e. running on your own machine without network communications. 2. Fully open-source. 3. Gratis.
The first one is a must, the second is very important for the public interest, and the third one is a nice-to-have.
Mistral does not appear to satisfy even the first-, let alone all three.
> The important thing to keep in mind is that there's no prompting needed, just upload the PDF and voila!
I'm sorry, noob here. I have a special book that I bought which I can open only inside the Kindle app (Windows/mobile). I have been meaning to screenshot the pages and convert them into a document/PDF. What do I have to do to make it fast? Just upload all the screenshots one by one and tell Mistral "Chat" to OCR them?