Tesseract is not a substitute for these models, which understand complex layouts and also extract bounding boxes for things like tables and pictures. They are also much better at making sense of cursive scripts.
I’ve been there, implementing a way to linearise text from a document with pages with 1, 2 or 3 columns, some of them in landscape is a nightmare. And that’s not even considering equations.
In the end it’s way easier to use a specialised model, trained by other people to do exactly what I need.
> "I’ve been there, implementing a way to linearise text from a document with pages with 1, 2 or 3 columns, some of them in landscape is a nightmare."
I thought it's actually a fun problem! Some of the naive solutions (based on alternating horizontal/vertical recursion) are quite elegant and cool.
It was fun!
What was not so fun was to make it work reliably. I ended up with piles of ugly code to handle edge cases, and issues kept piling up. So in the end I was happy to use someone else’s solution.
Tesseract is super picky though often failing pixel-perfect screenshots...
So, maybe it can be tuned for your usecase but with that kind of investment €3.5 for 1000 pages is a bargain...
It‘s also cheaper than the murican ones from Google, Amazon, …. And tesseract was an example. Heck you can go xberg and use paddleocr. Most often layout is less of a problem for ocr. Most often you need high accuracy, which tools like these are often worse in the 95 percentile.
Google documentai costs 1.5$ per 1000 which is probably better in quality and speed.