Choosing an engine

Choosing an engine

DocBox checks your computer's memory, processor and disk, and the Recommended start card on Setup picks the best model that will run smoothly on it. If you're unsure, start there.

Engine	Best for	Download size	Needs
PaddleOCR	Everyday scans, receipts, screenshots. Start here.	12–135 MB per model, plus the engine once	nothing
PaddleOCR-VL	Whole pages with tables and headings, kept in reading order	about 2 GB; a powerful computer	nothing
Tesseract	Clean printed pages, in many languages	about 4 MB per language	the free Tesseract program
EasyOCR	Unusual or decorative fonts	about 100 MB, plus a larger engine once	nothing
Ollama	AI vision models that read the whole image; good on messy pages	2–8 GB per model	the free Ollama program
NVIDIA NIM	Large cloud models when your computer is too slow	nothing	an NVIDIA API key; images are sent to NVIDIA

Quick picks

• Receipts, screenshots, phone photos of documents: PaddleOCR (Mobile is fastest, Large reads best).
• Reports and forms with tables: PaddleOCR-VL if your computer can run it, otherwise PaddleOCR.
• A language PaddleOCR doesn't cover: Tesseract.
• Handwriting or very messy pages: try an Ollama vision model.
• An old or slow computer: PaddleOCR Mobile, or NVIDIA NIM if sending those documents to a cloud service is acceptable.

Languages

PaddleOCR has versions for English, Chinese, Latin-script European languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch), Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian), Arabic, Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi) and Korean. Tesseract covers many more; each language is a separate small download.

Helper programs

Tesseract and Ollama are separate programs, and DocBox never installs them silently:

• Windows: click Install … for me under Connections. DocBox uses Windows' own installer, so Windows asks for permission too.
• macOS and Linux: copy the command shown under Connections and run it in a terminal.

Press Check again afterwards.

Freeing up space

Every downloaded model has a Remove button. Models › Engines on disk shows the space each engine uses, and Uninstall removes an engine with all of its models.