Need advice: Ubuntu OCR techniques

[Doug]

On 10/09/2011 01:34 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I'm new to OCR (optical character reading), have never done it 
> before.  Suddenly I have a need.
>
> I've been diving through old papers and have found hard-copy (appears 
> to be real Courier font, laser printed on white background) of a 
> program I wrote decades ago on a Macintosh 512K in Lightspeed C.  I 
> thought I had lost it completely.  I would like to recover it from the 
> hard-copy without typing ~100 pages of code.  I have a scanner, and 
> full Acrobat CS5 on a Windows machine, plus all the FOSS of Ubuntu 
> (tesseract, gocr, plus anything useful in multiverse).  Does anybody 
> know the fastest way to usable code from this situation?
>
> -- 
> Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
>
>
>
On Windows I have an old Nuance program that works pretty well, but it 
doesn't come cheap.
Also, Nuance will call you up on the phone and bother you every so 
often.  There is
also Foxit Reader, and ABBYY Fine Reader. In any case, even tho it works 
well, you will
have to proof-read everything very carefully. OCR programs are not 
perfect.  Probably
someone will know of a Linux program, but in this case, you may find you 
have to go
commercial to get the best performance.

NB:  When you scan, *make sure* that the page is absolutely straight. 
Just a couple degrees
off of the vertical and the OCR goes to hell in a hurry.

--doug


-- 
Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. --A. M. Greeley

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