churro-ocr

churro-ocr is a Python toolkit for OCR and page detection on historical documents.

Full documentation and project overview live at https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/.

Install

For the CLI-first workflow used in the docs, install Churro with UV as a tool.

uv tool install churro-ocr

If you are adding churro-ocr to a project instead, use uv add churro-ocr and prefix CLI commands with uv run.

Runtime setup and provider-specific install commands are in Getting Started and Providers And Configuration.

Which API Should You Use?

Quick Start

This example assumes you already installed the runtime for the provider you want to use.

from churro_ocr.ocr import OCRClient
from churro_ocr.providers import OCRBackendSpec, build_ocr_backend

backend = build_ocr_backend(
    OCRBackendSpec(
        provider="litellm",
        model="vertex_ai/gemini-2.5-flash",
    )
)

page = OCRClient(backend).ocr_image(image_path="scan.png")

print(page.text)

More

• Overview: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/
• Getting started: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/getting-started.html
• Benchmark leaderboard: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/leaderboard.html
• Provider setup: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/guides/providers.html
• CLI docs: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/cli.html
• API reference: https://stanford-oval.github.io/Churro/api/index.html