Interesting. I guess this was mostly focussed on hand writing though right? If it was simply extracting text from an image, for example an error screenshot, then I guess a local gem might be accurate enough. I played with a python library for something like this a while ago and got reasonable results. Sometimes it was garbage, but the results would never be read by the community, only the search engine. If the user notcied something silly they could always modify the hidden text.