The 02.11.19 at 08:06, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
OCR has been the Cinderella application of the Linux world.
That's what I'm starting to think.
Until relatively recently there was nothing at all which worked well enough for use in the real world. Xocr was hopeless. Gocr, as Carlos says, is (sort of) usable, but lacks (or lacked, when I tried it) the sort of sophistication needed for real use. I never tried clara.
Either it is broken in suse 8.1, or it is that way. It used 99% CPU, and was unresponsive to the mouse. No output whatsoever.
Now, however, there is at least one good commercial OCR package available in a Linux version: OCRshop. See
Thanks, I'll take a note, but it is not justified in my case.
By the way, a file format which lends itself very well to OCR is the TIFF format used in faxes. For some reason, character recognition in this format is particularly reliable.
It seems that gocr prefers .pnm, and clara only accepts .pbm (monochrome, 1 bit, no grays .pnm file). -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson