Ubuntu
tesseract package

Need a good OCR solution for linux.

Asked by komputes

I would like to explore what Linux has to offer in the domain of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so I did some research and started blindly testing kooka, gocr and ocrad. I can't seem to get this to work. If anyone has experience with OCR it would be appreciated.

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marcobra (Marco Braida)
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Álvaro del Olmo Alonso (dllum) said : 		#1

I have experienced with XSane. It comes in the Ubuntu default installation. It works quite well with single texts.
http://www.xsane.org/
Hope that helps.
Regards.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#2

I am looking for an update for this question.

Alvaro, XSane is great if you have a scanner. XSane opens looking for a scanner and then closes when it does not find one. I need a program where I can feed in a picture, select a block of text and OCR it into editable text which I can copy to a text editor.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#3

I am looking for an update for this question.

Alvaro, XSane is great if you have a scanner. XSane opens looking for a scanner and then closes when it does not find one. I need a program where I can feed in a picture, select a block of text and OCR it into editable text which I can copy to a text editor.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#4

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#5

Auto expired. Sill need answer.

Launchpad Janitor wrote:
> Your question #32518 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/32518
>
> Status: Open => Expired
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> Launchpad Janitor expired the question:
> This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state
> without activity for the last 15 days.
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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#6

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#7

Still requires solution.

Launchpad Janitor wrote:
> Your question #32518 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/32518
>
> Status: Open => Expired
>
> Launchpad Janitor expired the question:
> This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state
> without activity for the last 15 days.
>
>

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#8

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#9

answer still needed

Launchpad Janitor wrote:
> Your question #32518 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/32518
>
> Status: Open => Expired
>
> Launchpad Janitor expired the question:
> This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state
> without activity for the last 15 days.
>
>

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#10

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#11

Unanswered

Launchpad Janitor wrote:
> Your question #32518 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/32518
>
> Status: Open => Expired
>
> Launchpad Janitor expired the question:
> This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state
> without activity for the last 15 days.
>
>

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Best marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#12

This are some ocr open-source for Linux

ocrad
tesseract-ocr
gocr-tk

Using System->Administration->Software sources [Ubuntu software tab] please enable (Check the checkbox) all the showed repositories rows.

Then open a Terminal from the menu Applications->Accessories->Terminal and type:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo aptitude install ocrad tesseract-ocr gocr-tk

give your user password when requested, you don't see nothing when you type it, then press enter.

Other ocr list:
http://swik.net/OCR+Software
http://www.linux-ocr.ekitap.gen.tr/

Hope this helps

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#13

Thank you marcobra for the suggestions. I have heard good things about tesseract-ocr, so I thought I would give it a try. I finally got it working. It's not perfect but it works better than anything up to date. I found that you should use a high quality tiff image when converting to text through OCR or you are likely to run into spelling errors.

Here's what I did:

in a shell:
$ sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng

Open a scan or an image in GIMP and crop the text out.

Image > Mode > Grayscale
Tools > Color Tools > Threshold (for good contrast)
Image - Mode - Indexed (to black & white - like a fax)
File > Save as jpeg

in a shell:
convert image.jpg image.tif
tesseract image.tif text.txt

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komputes (komputes) said : 		#14

Thanks marcobra, that solved my question.