[PLUG] OCR software?

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Wed Apr 5 16:17:55 UTC 2006


# from John Jason Jordan
# on Wednesday 05 April 2006 08:29 am:

>Taking a wild
>guess I assumed that this message meant that Xsane could not find an
>OCR utility.

Sounds like you're catching on.

>I installed
>gocr, the gocr-doc package and gocr-gtk. Afterwards Xsane was happy to
>OCR the image, but the results were lousy.

I'm guessing that you might want to scan the page to a (pbm) file and 
work from that while you're trying to get the OCR working just-so.  If 
xsane runs the scanner every time you try this, that extended wait is 
going to be frustrating.

What resolution is your capture?  200-300 dpi B&W is typically 
considered to be the minimum.

>The problem is I can't figure out how to tweak gocr. From my
> experience with OCR programs on Windows there should be a "learning"
> tool and other goodies to enhance the results.

Were those goodies free?  GPL?  Then you could just port the relevant 
bits to linux and be all set :-)

OCR is not an easy problem.

http://kooka.kde.org/ is only going to be a different front-end and will 
either interface with gocr, ocrad, or a commercial app (if you want to 
spend $1k on it -- sounds like a $100 donation to gocr or ocrad might 
be a good investment :-/

>I assumed gocr-doc was the Help file, but I can't figure out how to
>launch it or read it. There are no entries on the gnome panel to
> launch gocr or gocr-doc. From the command line I tried gocr, gocr-doc
> and gocr-gtk, but all returned just "command not found."

I'm guessing that ubuntu has dpkg.

  dpkg -L gocr
  dpkg -L gocr | grep bin

might help find it.

--Eric
-- 
[...proprietary software is better than gpl because...] "There is value
in having somebody you can write checks to, and they fix bugs."
--Mike McNamara (president of a commercial software company)
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