After months of testing and tweaking the default settings:
Overall. Average error across the 8 hard to read test pages is now 4.2% with default settings (was 7.5%). After calibrating on a sample page and setting PairWeight := 0, it’s now down to 3.1%, the best result. Instead of using Tesseract OCR engine and the Leptonica image processing library, our OCR Master Suite is 100% Pure Pascal, no external DLL required.