If you plan on using tesseract definitely try out their 4.0 beta, which uses LSTMs.
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/4.0-with-LST...
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/4.0-with-LST...
> The Tesseract 4.00 neural network subsystem is integrated into Tesseract as a line recognizer.
The LSTM is used in layout analysis, not in character recognition.