PaddleOCR wraps the PP-OCRv5 API to pull text from images, PDFs, and screenshots. You pass it a URL or local file path, it returns line-level strings with optional bounding boxes. The docs are thorough about when to use it: grab text from scans and photos, skip it for tables or complex layouts where you need structure preserved. Strong on CJK and handwritten text according to the description. Requires API credentials from paddleocr.com, runs via uv with inline PEP 723 dependencies. Output defaults to timestamped JSON files in temp unless you explicitly pipe to stdout. If you need raw text extraction without wrestling with layout reconstruction, this does the job cleanly.
npx skills add https://github.com/paddlepaddle/paddleocr --skill paddleocr-text-recognition