Why Your Tesseract OCR Results Suck (and How to Fix Them Fast)

This article details the methodology for digitizing and preparing historical documents for OCR using Tesseract. It covers challenges in data collection from aged archives, preprocessing techniques such as binarization, skew correction, and noise removal, as well as environment setup and dataset preparation. The study follows established evaluation frameworks while adapting them to Tesseract 5, offering insights into improving OCR accuracy on degraded or complex archival materials.