ksbhaskar wrote: > --- In [email protected], Tim Churches <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [KSB] <...snip...> > >> But if anyone can suggest an alternative for turning data recorded on >> paper forms into data (as opposed to raster image) files, we'd love to >> hear of it. > > [KSB] Did you look at Ocrad > (http://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html) perchance? Is it > anywhere near viability?
No, haven't tried it, but reading various blogs suggests that it is not, whereas Tesseract, despite being of early-90s vintage, is a viable option, perhaps. It is available as a debian package, I think, so should be easy to try out. Of course, most people are using Tesseract etc to read machine-printed text.... which is very different to reading hand-written text. Surely there are open source handwriting recognition engines? There are some, but they focus on stroke recognition as characters are written on a touch screen, not on post-hoc recognition of handwritten text. I think that Teleform may be the only (commercial, closed-source, alas) game in town for what our older users want to be able to do. Tim C
