Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 Languages
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderIn case it's not clear, Tesseract is developed by Google since 2006, having been started at HP in 1985 and open-sourced by HP in 2005. [1] As far as I know, it powers all OCR at Google (e.g. in Keep, Docs, etc.). This (Tesseract.js) is a WASM port of the project by a separate group of people. I investigated using this port a couple years ago, but as you can see from the demo, it's fairly slow to initialize and…
I've used Tesseract.js to recognise the https://** links from the camera input and to make them clickable. First issue I've encountered was the text recognition performance. Depending on the camera input (if the image contained something that looked like the text or not) I've got 2-20+ seconds per 640x640px image for text recognition on iPhone X. Not so fast as you may see. But the recognition was pretty accurate though. The performance, as expected, improves when the image size is…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 505
- Total comments
- 114
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-10-15 | Tesseract.js is a pure JavaScript port of the popular Tesseract OCR engine | vs2 | 7 | 0 |
| 2017-08-03 | OCR in the browser | westonplatter0 | 2 | 0 |
| 2019-12-20 | Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 LanguagesFirst breakout · Best thread | petercooper | 364 | 77 |
| 2021-08-08 | Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engineLatest 20+ point return | kiyanwang | 132 | 37 |