Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

disciple · Last edited by disciple on Tue 12 Jan 2010, 08:54; edited 3 times in total

Tesseract is the most accurate Open Source character recognition, but it has no layout analysis. If you intend to scan pages with parallel columns, you should use Ocropus (here), which uses the Tesseract engine.
If not, you will have to get rid of all the unnecessary line breaks with Tesseract, but the actual character recognition is better than with Ocropus.
In my tests tesseract was almost 100% accurate, except it missed a few spaces, and a few symmetrical apostrophes ' were turned into left-hand side single quotes ‘
This is much better than the OCR engine included in Microsoft Office, and MUCH better than gocr Smile

1. Install from here (512 kb)
2. Copy everything from /local to /usr/local, then you can delete /local (I made a mistake packaging it... I'll package version 3 sometime and get it right).
2. Download your language file (English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese or Old German) from http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list (900 to 1400 kb)
YOU WANT THE "LANGUAGE DATA" file, not the "SOURCE TRAINING DATA" file. If you have a different language, you'd better make them Smile

3. Extract the language file into /usr/local/share (so the stuff should be ending up in /usr/local/share/tessdata).
4. Run with e.g.

WhoDo

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2949 Location: Southampton, UK

Puppylinux.org doesn't host packages at the moment, I think we did this to ensure that the site would not run out of transfer quota.
I'm sure Caneri can help.

disciple · Posted: Tue 23 Sep 2008, 07:37 Post subject:

OK, we'll see about that.
Oops. That was a pretty bad typo. I meant "over 1MB" Smile

Dingo

lluamco · Joined: 16 Mar 2007 Posts: 206 Location: Banyoles, Spain

disciple

OK I uploaded it and updated the first post.
It turned out I COULD get it under 1MB, but not OCRopus (see link), so thanks Caneri Smile

Dingo · Posted: Thu 25 Sep 2008, 08:29 Post subject:

thanks linked all two topics and mirrored on dokupuppy:

http://puppylover.netsons.org/dokupuppy/programs:ocr

disciple · Posted: Thu 25 Sep 2008, 08:30 Post subject:

BTW I was mistaken. Ocropus does not have a gui, but does have a complex set of Lua scripts Smile

disciple · Posted: Sat 28 Feb 2009, 19:51 Post subject:

Here are some OCR proofing aids that should be useful; probably more so if you are doing a lot of ocr:

http://gutcheck.sourceforge.net/

disciple

This should also be useful before you do the OCR.

Unpaper is a tool for straightening pages and removing black edges, including in the middle, where you have photocopied an open book!

I haven't tested it, and it is at an early stage of development, but it certainly looks good Smile

You'll need to figure out how to convert your images to and from .pnm

jrb · Posted: Thu 23 Apr 2009, 17:03 Post subject:

I have built ch-tesseract-2.01-OCR-en.sfs, an english version of tesseract. Tesseract_OCR is placed on the right click menu. If you right click on a .tif file it will produce a text file with the same name in a few seconds. However it is very fussy about these .tif files. You may have to open them in mtpaint or another graphics program and resave them. Even the training files required this. After that, however, it seems to work very well.

I have also placed a menu item on the Documents menu which opens a text file with these same instructions.

Packages for other major languages are available and can be easily built.

Let me know how it works for you. J

disciple · Posted: Fri 24 Apr 2009, 02:42 Post subject:

To download that sfs use the username "puppy" and password "linux" - I had to fill it in several times for some reason (unless the last time I changed it and put a capital or something?).

Dromeno · Joined: 12 Sep 2008 Posts: 534

OCR is one of those fields where windows applications still outshine the Linux ones. But fortunately for us puppy users, Scansoft Omnipage -my favorite- works (via wine). And it even works as 'portable' (just copy the Omnipage files from C:\Program files to some external device).

disciple · Posted: Fri 24 Apr 2009, 20:13 Post subject:

So I gather that is better because it deals with layout? Tesseract is noticeably more accurate than any of the windows products I've tried (some products are as accurate, and I suspect that one would be); where it is lacking is layout analysis.
They say that produces perfectly formatted documents, but how editable are they really? I've never tried any software that produces output that is formatted to match the original well and is also readily editable - it tends to be like copying text from a pdf.