Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[disciple]

This is an OCR program using the tesseract engine but with layout analysis. In my tests it seems "layout analysis" just means it recognizes columns of text, reads each of them and then strings them all together including headers, footers etc. It is noticeably less accurate than Tesseract, and probably only a little better than the OCR engine in Microsoft Office. This is still much better than gocr
I recommend using Tesseract itself (here) unless you intend to scan pages with parallel columns.
It produces an html file that copies and pastes nicely from a browser (not Dillo I think as it hasn't got UTF) to a word processor.

1. Install from here (1121kb).
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
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.

[disciple]

Also check out the extra tools I posted in the Tesseract thread.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=279332#279332
and the following post.

[miriam]

A newer version of OCRopus is out that no longer uses tesseract -- it uses its own character recognition software instead. I haven't tried it yet.

The new tesseract 3.00 detects columns. I've compiled it, but haven't learned how to make pets yet. It feels slower than tesseract 2, probably because it is looking for columns and perhaps other things, though I'm running it on a much, much, much slower computer since my nice fast computer died (wah!).

[disciple]

[rcrsn51]

Tesseract 3 is twice as big as Tesseract 2 when packaged as a PET and is somewhat slower. But it does a good job of detecting columns. And it's compatible with Peasyscan.

[Sit Heel Speak]

In case anyone does wish to attempt building OCRopus from trunk, I have just posted a .pet of mercurial, here.

[miriam]

Wow, thanks disciple. Now that I have the name of the new2dir command I looked it up and have learned lots about making pets, including the really essential part that I didn't know about dir2pet. I've been compiling programs for my various machines for many years. In future I'll make pets for Puppy and share them around. Yay!

I haven't actually tried OCRopus yet. I simply read the details on their GoogleCode page http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/ and on the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus however I expect I will try it in the near future. I've long felt that neural networks are the only sensible way to get reliable OCR. I'm especially interested that OCRopus can have the code to read handwriting enabled (it is disabled by default).

It is a bit hard to tell how tesseract 3 compares with the older tesseract 2 because my current machine (until I get a newer one) is soooo slow.

Thanks for the info about cunieform, but I'm very reluctant to put any effort into getting Wine working on my machine after having finally rid myself of all last traces of pesky M$ stuff.

[disciple]

Please note: the only reason anyone would want to run the old Windows version of cuneiform is for table recognition. I believe the Linux version should be just as capable apart from that.

[miriam]

Oops, sorry. My bad. My eyes glazed over at the mention of Windows and I am a little embarrassed to admit I didn't read the part that followed properly.

Much more interesting than I thought. Thank you.
Downloading now... Yeow! 25MB! Big.
But it does sound like a very cool program.
http://www.cuneiform.ru/eng/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CuneiForm_(software)

Weird... the text of this post disappeared, but is here when I edit it... I deleted it all and added stuff back in line by line.
Huh. It is the Wikipedia address. I can't make it a link -- the parentheses probably confuse the bulletin board software.