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How to turn scanned pages and PDFs into text with OCR with Paddock

Read a page as plain text or as labelled blocks with their positions, using a local OCR model.

Authorization notice. Paddock is dual-use. Only use it on software, sites and systems you own or have explicit permission to test.

Who it is forAn operations or records clerk with a folder of scanned PDFs or page images that need to become searchable text.

The problemRetyping scanned pages by hand is slow and error-prone, and cloud OCR may not be allowed for some documents.

The outcomeText output for each page, or labelled blocks with their boxes, produced on your own hardware.

What you need first

  • An NVIDIA GPU with the NVIDIA driver installed, or an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 or later
  • Download access to the Paddock release page on GitHub (Windows, Linux, Linux arm64 on DGX Spark, or macOS)
  • Disk space for the model checkpoints you choose to download
  • For cloud comparison: an account with an OpenRouter or other OpenAI-compatible endpoint, if you want to compare against a cloud model

Steps

  1. Install Paddock and run paddock to open the Studio.
  2. Download LightOnOCR-3 (0.8B or 4B) or PaddleOCR-VL 1.6 from the Documents and OCR models in the Studio.
  3. Open the PDF in the Studio, since PDF rendering to images is built in through pdfium.
  4. Run the OCR model on the pages and choose plain text or labelled blocks as the output.
  5. Save the output and check it against the original pages for errors.

Prompt for your agent

Using the Paddock repo at truespar/paddock, run the LightOnOCR-3 model on the PDF at <path-to-pdf> and return the text of the first page. Verify by comparing the output with the page visually for any obvious missed or wrong words.

Caveat. The README lists PDF rendering as an optional convenience, so the quality of OCR output still needs checking by a person on important documents.

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