[PLUG] Scanning and OCR in Linux

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 12:58:39 -0700
Christian <christian at rocksolidservice.com> dijo:

> Which version of linux are you running? If it is a Debian based distro, 
> try clara. Goto www.google.com/linux and search for clara. Goto the 
> packages.debian.org/unstable.... site. it will tell you more about it. I 
> have not tried it but it looks pretty good. Also, in the future include 
> your version of Linux (Slackware, Debian, RedHat etc.) This will help 
> others to help you better.

Thanks fof the suggestion. I am using Ubuntu-64 Breezy. Sorry, I should have stated that at the beginning. Culpa mea.

As for clara, it is listed in Synaptic, so I installed it. However, it did not create a menu item in the gnome panel to launch it. No problem, I opened a terminal and typed "clara." That resulted in a window popping up, then immediately disappearing, and a message in the terminal window "segmentation fault." Evidently clara does not like something on my computer. :(

In the meantime, I have been googling on OCR and linux and discovered a few things, the most significant of which is that abbyy has released a development kit for Linux, and evidently it is free:

http://www.abbyy.com/for_developers/?param=28804

In the Windows world, abbyy's  FineReader is considered the best OCR software for the individual desktop. There are others that run a close second, but FineReader is held as the one to beat. So now it's time for the Linux proggers to create an interface for the abbyy OCR engine.

In the meantime, I guess I have to rely on Windows to do OCR.