At 08:59 AM 3/10/2004 -0500, Hal MacArgle wrote: [...]
> 1. Run a program that will scan to an image file, then a separate program > that will do OCR on the scanned image.
Done - scan to PBM (P4) then run Gocr to get a bit mapped file.. Trouble is; even using resolution 360, slow and a big PBM file, the final copy is about 90% accurate and the original format of the letter compromized losing paragraphs, offsets, indents, etc... Taking the time to do all this plus fix up the immediate above would take almost as long as manually re-typing the page..
Yes, this is always the problem with OCR. Back when I did a lot of it (about 12-15 years ago, on a Macintosh), OCR packages included the "brag" that they were 99% accurate. I, like any serious user, had no trouble translating "99% accurate" to "an error every 3 lines of text" and was unimpressed. For everyday use, OCR needs about "four 9s" of accuracy, translating to one error every few pages of text.
If your 90% estimate is correct, it translates to (on average) several errors per line of text, making the process close to worthless for you.
Of course, any OCR package is better on some images than others. I don't know what your source pages look like. For example, serif fonts (e.g., Times Roman, Century Schoolbook, Palatino) are generally easier to OCR well than sanserif fonts (e.g., Ariel, anything with "sans" in the name). Fresh printouts are better then third-generation Xeroxes. And so on.
I expect that you are at the point where you need help from someone with real and current expertise in OCR work, preferably on Linux. That's not me, and from the surrounding silence, I suspect it is not to be found on this list.
I fetched Clara but could only find a .rpm file, no tarball could for Slackware, etc.. Slack has a rpm program but the dependencies needed to extract looked like they were mostly Red Hat's filenames..
Well ... a source .tgz can be downloaded from a link on this page -- http://www.claraocr.org/
(Thank you, Google).
I can find prepackaged binaries only for SuSE and Debian, myself.
> In practice on Linux/Unix systems, any program of the second sort will
> probably be a wrapper for two separate apps that function as in (1) ...
> sort of the way "abcde" automates the process of CD ripping by serving as a
> frontend to about a half-dozen different applications.
I'm a CLI person so no front ends involved here..
Just a clarification ... not all front ends are graphical, X-based fronetnds. The example, I gave, abcde, is a CLI-based "wrapper" script, but it hands off actual processing to about a half dozen different applications that work behind the scenes.
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