Scanning works better than under Windows. OCR sucks rocks. As far as I can tell there are only two OCR "engines" for Linux, gocr and ocrad. Both might work better if I could get them to use a dictionary. I can't find any way to get ocrad to use a dictionary at all. Gocr will, but only under Kooka (not XSane), and it won't use any dictionary that I have installed, which is to say, the OO.o dictionaries. That's because you have to choose the dictionary in a drop-down box that you can't type into, and none of the OO.o dictionaries are listed. Plus there is a bug in Kooka that requires you to close and restart the program for each page you OCR. Also, there is no "Scan" button on OO.o Writer that will launch a scan/ocr utility -- although that is a minor kvetch.
I do realize the OCR software is incredibly complicated. Outfits like Aabbyy, OmniPage, and others have spent many milliions of dollars on programmer salaries to develop their OCR engines. One of my big complaints, however, is that, even if the OCR engine worked well, you can't get it to work because the GUI is not implemented correctly. In Kooka, for example, you can click on a button and sometimes absolutely nothing happens. What passes for documentation sometimes doesn't even explain what a button is supposed to do. As far as I can tell the programmer just put some of the buttons on the interface and never got around to writing the code to make them do anything. So are there any other Linux OCR choices besides ocrad and gocr? (I include command line tools, as long as I can figure out how to use them; i.e., they come with understandable documentation.) Or are there any commercial OCR utilities that will run under Linux? Or should I hire a typist to keyboard stuff into the computer for me? Right now I have used XSane (a very nice utility) to scan the 35 pages I need to TIFF files. XSane does a great job. I used TIFF because I know Windows OCR utilities can OCR from a TIFF without needing a scanner. So, push come to shove, I can move the TIFFs to my Windows computer and finish up there. But there must be something that works under Linux and will create text that I can use in Writer. Anyone know of anything? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
