Confidential OCR
The Endeavour 2024-11-20
A client emailed me a screenshot of a table rather than pasting the table as text into an email.
I thought about using an LLM to convert it to text, but the table is confidential client information and so I shouldn’t upload it anywhere.
I searched for a command line utility to do OCR and found tesseract. I installed it with
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr libtesseract-dev tesseract-ocr-eng
and ran it with the default settings
tesseract screenshot.png textfile
It worked remarkably well. I had to change a C to a U, but otherwise I didn’t have to add or change any text, but I did have to delete a few extraneous parentheses generated by the software.
I work locally in part out of habit; it was the only way to work when I started using a computer. It has numerous advantages, such as being able to keep working when a hurricane knocks out my internet connection, but above all it is private.
I pay more attention to privacy than is convenient because I work in data privacy. And aside from my privacy, I have to protect our clients’ privacy.