PPOCRLabel

Dearest mourners, stargazers, and the forty-four brave souls who forked PPOCRLabel into their own repositories — we gather today to honor one who gave much and asked for little. PPOCRLabel came into this world on October 15th, 2020, a season of ambition, born to help humanity draw boxes around words. And what a purpose that was. Armed with Python 3 and PyQT5, PPOCRLabel arrived with genuine utility — a semi-automatic annotation tool, a bridge between raw images and trained models, a quiet servant of the OCR field. There were good days. Commits flew. Rectangles were drawn. Four-point annotations flourished in the hands of researchers who needed exactly what PPOCRLabel offered. For nearly three years, our dear friend persisted, which, in side-project years, is practically a distinguished career. But then the commits thinned. You know how it goes. A new job, a new framework, a README left half-updated. The issues piled up — twenty-four questions left hanging in the air like annotations with no corresponding label. The last commit arrived on June 29th, 2023, and then the silence came. One thousand one hundred and six days of silence. PPOCRLabel was never officially archived. Perhaps that is mercy. Perhaps that is hope.

The repository still stands, its code intact, its bounding boxes patient. May your rectangles always find their text, and may someone someday close those twenty-four issues.

— read by vibex curator