Fc5, latest xsane install.
After scanning a text doc, can't get xsane to save text doc,
it will make a file in /home/user/out.txt , but it won't save text in file, file is blank.
I had to download gocr-0.37-0.2.fc5.rf.i386.rpm and install before
it would even attempt to save anything.

Jim

Are you doing an OCR? If not it will be an image file not a text file. Is that your problem?

I guess I'am, how do you do a text scan?

Jim

Are you saying you want to OCR (optical character recognition) but can't
I'm sure there used to be an OCR plugin button on Xsane, that didn't conect to anything but that's on mine now.
I've just googled it and came up with this from the Xsane FAQ

11.11. Are there any OCR-packages availlable?

Both xsane and QuiteInsane are frontends that allow you to use an OCR package.

At Sourceforge, there is project jocr, also called gocr. http://jocr.sourceforge.net It seems to be quite usable, though my own experiences were not so good.

An other package is Clara http://www.claraocr.org I was impressed by the recognition, though there are still some problems to be resolved. At the moment, this is the package of my choice. It requires a lot of training effort!

There are many more packages, especially if you include the commercial ones.

The G(J)OCR project page also has links to five other free OCR packages: http://jocr.sourceforge.net/links.html , none of which I have tested.

Yes, well how do I save a regular text file, again I can scan it but
I can't save it to /home/user/file.txt as text.

Jim

Sorry I thought I'd made it clear.
A scanner can only make an image, it's like a camera, it takes a picture!

text isn't an image, each number letter is a seperately entity, whereas the image of text is one big picture.

The picture of text can be converted to text by a proccess know as optical character regognition (OCR)

That's why I posted the link to OCR software, without it you can't save as text.

The other option if you got software with your scanner, (mine had OCR program with it), you may get this to run in wine, (but that's a whole new ball game)

I do have gocr installed, what would I do to get read ,save text.

jim

Sorry Jim, I've no idea, I've never used it.
By the sounds of gocr it's a pugin for xsane, I assume you see no extra button has appeared in xsane?
And you don't have a start button gocr?
My approach from there would be to type gocr into run application or just on the comand line and see what happens, if nothing try "man gocr", if still nothing google it or see if there's a web site with any instructions.

The odd times I need to OCR I've done it with the windows software that came with the scanner.
With that you can open the image file from the software and tell it to OCR it.

It works best with a high contrast image, ie no shades of grey, just black and white. But be carefull if you try for too much contrast you can loose some information and that doesn't help either. Image size is another thing that affects it, from memory 300dpi for an A4 sheet works OK.