Haven't seen many people mention it, but have just been using the PaddleOCR library on it's own and has been very good for me. Often achieving better quality/accuracy than some of the best V-LLM's, and generally much better quality than other open-source OCR models I've tried like Tesseract for example.

That being said, my use case is definitely focused primarily on digital text, so if you're working with handwritten text, take this with a grain of salt.

https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/main/README_e...

https://huggingface.co/spaces/echo840/ocrbench-leaderboard