Should I use OCRopus or Tesseract?
You might consider using OCRopus right now if you require layout analysis, if you want to contribute to it, if you find its output format more convenient (HTML with embedded OR information), and/or if you anticipate requiring some of its other capabilities in the future (pluggability, multiple scripts, statistical language models, etc.). In terms of character error rates, OCRopus performs similar to Tesseract. In terms of layout analysis, OCRopus is significantly better than Tesseract. The main reasons not to use OCRopus yet is that it hasn’t been packaged yet, that it has limited multi-platform support, and that it runs somewhat slower. We hope to address all those issues by the beta release.
