What software for scanning OCR

bscho · 10-17-2014, 02:39 PM

Hi,
I have Linux Mint 17 and had my PC stolen with all my valuable writings.
I have saved a lot of my writings on A4 sheets.

I want to scan in my pages and recreate my writings.
I am told that I can get Optical Character Software (OCR) to do this.

What if any software is available for scanning in my A4 pages?

jefro · 10-17-2014, 04:34 PM

Yes and no. There are about 4 good OCR apps. One is commercial and may be best. The free ones are pretty crummy. I gave up and just used a business copy machine that seemed to be almost perfect.

tesseract was promised by google but seemed to stop.

ABBYY seems to be tested with best results.

A number of other apps around.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OCR

c0d3d · 10-17-2014, 05:58 PM

Try Tesseract. It should be able to read your files.

@jefro: Tesseract is still being developed. The last code change was on October 14, 2014.

metaschima · 10-17-2014, 06:57 PM

Tesseract is the best FLOSS one. I recommend doing some preprocessing of the images before feeding them in, or use a program that does that. Try to get them black text on pure white background.

John VV · 10-17-2014, 07:02 PM

I have used "Tesseract" in the past
for almost all normal fonts it has no problems

handwriting ?????
if it is hand wrote "block" text that will work well ( mostly)

bscho · 10-18-2014, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John VV

I have used "Tesseract" in the past
for almost all normal fonts it has no problems

handwriting ?????
if it is hand wrote "block" text that will work well ( mostly)

It seems that Tesseract is popular I tried to download it using apt-get
but it does not find it when I try to start it as sudo apt-get install Tesseract.

Is this not available with apt-get?

c0d3d · 10-18-2014, 06:29 PM

@bscho: The command should be "sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr"

John VV · 10-18-2014, 06:31 PM

do not know about ubuntu / mint
but on suse

Code:

su -
zypper in tesseract

just do a search
" zypper se tesseract"
displays a TON of downloads including different languages

from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto

Code:

apt-get update
apt-cache search tesseract

Habitual · 10-18-2014, 07:01 PM

Code:

sudo install tesseract-ocr

67 languaeges too

Code:

tesseract-ocr-afr - tesseract-ocr language files for Afrikaans
tesseract-ocr-ara - tesseract-ocr language files for Arabic
tesseract-ocr-aze - tesseract-ocr language files for Azerbaijani
tesseract-ocr-bel - tesseract-ocr language files for Belarusian
tesseract-ocr-ben - tesseract-ocr language files for Bengali
tesseract-ocr-bul - tesseract-ocr language files for Bulgarian
tesseract-ocr-cat - tesseract-ocr language files for Catalan
tesseract-ocr-ces - tesseract-ocr language files for Czech
tesseract-ocr-chi-sim - tesseract-ocr language files for Simplified Chinese
tesseract-ocr-chi-tra - tesseract-ocr language files for Traditional Chinese
tesseract-ocr-chr - tesseract-ocr language files for Cherokee
tesseract-ocr-dan - tesseract-ocr language files for Danish
tesseract-ocr-deu - tesseract-ocr language files for German
tesseract-ocr-deu-frak - tesseract-ocr language files for German Fraktur
tesseract-ocr-dev - transitional dummy package
tesseract-ocr-ell - tesseract-ocr language files for Greek
tesseract-ocr-eng - tesseract-ocr language files for English
tesseract-ocr-enm - tesseract-ocr language files for Middle English
tesseract-ocr-epo - tesseract-ocr language files for Esperanto
tesseract-ocr-equ - tesseract-ocr language files for equations
tesseract-ocr-est - tesseract-ocr language files for Estonian
tesseract-ocr-eus - tesseract-ocr language files for Basque
tesseract-ocr-fin - tesseract-ocr language files for Finnish
tesseract-ocr-fra - tesseract-ocr language files for French
tesseract-ocr-frk - tesseract-ocr language files for Frankish
tesseract-ocr-frm - tesseract-ocr language files for Middle French
tesseract-ocr-glg - tesseract-ocr language files for Galician
tesseract-ocr-grc - tesseract-ocr language files for ancient Greek
tesseract-ocr-heb - tesseract-ocr language files for Hebrew
tesseract-ocr-hin - tesseract-ocr language files for Hindi
tesseract-ocr-hrv - tesseract-ocr language files for Croatian
tesseract-ocr-hun - tesseract-ocr language files for Hungarian
tesseract-ocr-ind - tesseract-ocr language files for Indonesian
tesseract-ocr-isl - tesseract-ocr language files for Icelandic
tesseract-ocr-ita - tesseract-ocr language files for Italian
tesseract-ocr-ita-old - tesseract-ocr language files for Old Italian
tesseract-ocr-jpn - tesseract-ocr language files for Japanese
tesseract-ocr-kan - tesseract-ocr language files for Kannada
tesseract-ocr-kor - tesseract-ocr language files for Korean
tesseract-ocr-lav - tesseract-ocr language files for Latvian
tesseract-ocr-lit - tesseract-ocr language files for Lithuanian
tesseract-ocr-mal - tesseract-ocr language files for Malayalam
tesseract-ocr-mkd - tesseract-ocr language files for Macedonian
tesseract-ocr-mlt - tesseract-ocr language files for Maltese
tesseract-ocr-msa - tesseract-ocr language files for Malay
tesseract-ocr-nld - tesseract-ocr language files for Dutch
tesseract-ocr-nor - tesseract-ocr language files for Norwegian
tesseract-ocr-osd - tesseract-ocr language files for script and orientation
tesseract-ocr-pol - tesseract-ocr language files for Polish
tesseract-ocr-por - tesseract-ocr language files for Portuguese
tesseract-ocr-ron - tesseract-ocr language files for Romanain
tesseract-ocr-rus - tesseract-ocr language files for Russian
tesseract-ocr-slk - tesseract-ocr language files for Slovak
tesseract-ocr-slk-frak - tesseract-ocr language files for Slovak Fractur
tesseract-ocr-slv - tesseract-ocr language files for Slovenian
tesseract-ocr-spa - tesseract-ocr language files for Spanish
tesseract-ocr-spa-old - tesseract-ocr language files for Old Spanish
tesseract-ocr-sqi - tesseract-ocr language files for Albanian
tesseract-ocr-srp - tesseract-ocr language files for Serbian
tesseract-ocr-swa - tesseract-ocr language files for Swahili
tesseract-ocr-swe - tesseract-ocr language files for Swedish
tesseract-ocr-tam - tesseract-ocr language files for Tamil
tesseract-ocr-tel - tesseract-ocr language files for Telugu
tesseract-ocr-tgl - tesseract-ocr language files for Tagalog
tesseract-ocr-tha - tesseract-ocr language files for Thai
tesseract-ocr-tur - tesseract-ocr language files for Turkish
tesseract-ocr-ukr - tesseract-ocr language files for Ukranian
tesseract-ocr-vie - tesseract-ocr language files for Vietnamese

c0d3d · 10-18-2014, 08:43 PM

You probably only want the english language files for tesseract (tesseract-ocr-eng).

bscho · 10-19-2014, 08:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by c0d3d

@bscho: The command should be "sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr"

I have tried that and the terminal says:
tesseract-ocr is already the newest version
tesseract-ocr set to manually installed.

It recognizes the program but doesn't download.
Any suggestions?

c0d3d · 10-19-2014, 02:02 PM

It means that it is already downloaded. Are you sure you downloaded the English language files ("apt-get install tesseract-ocr-eng")?

Keep in mind that this software has no GUI. It is terminal-based only (you might be able to get a custom GUI for it from here if you really want one).

bscho · 10-19-2014, 03:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by c0d3d

It means that it is already downloaded. Are you sure you downloaded the English language files ("apt-get install tesseract-ocr-eng")?

Keep in mind that this software has no GUI. It is terminal-based only (you might be able to get a custom GUI for it from here if you really want one).

No thanks I did not know it had no gui. You are right it is loaded and gives 10 command options.
I found that its output is in English.

Can you tell me if there is a help file for it somewhere?

c0d3d · 10-19-2014, 03:46 PM

"man tesseract-ocr" should give a help file.

bscho · 10-19-2014, 04:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by c0d3d

"man tesseract-ocr" should give a help file.

Thanks for your prompt reply. I have tried that and I get
No manual entry for tesseract-ocr.

Any other way of getting the manual?