I know there was already some talking about it. But not very clearly
So I insist:
an OCR to use wherever you are would be useful for a lot of people
I know, GOCR is not the very best, but it seems to respond to the requirements of portable apps:
GOCR is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program, developed under the GNU Public License. It converts scanned images of text back to text files. Joerg Schulenburg started the program, and now leads a team of developers.
GOCR can be used with different front-ends, which makes it very easy to port to different OSes and architectures. It can open many different image formats, and its quality have been improving in a daily basis.
so why not use this?
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The downside to a OCR program is the requirement of a OCR compatable scanner.
I Use a freeware program called Top OCR. It is optimised to use a camera instead of a scanner and it works extremely well.
it looks nice, have unpacked it and it looks as it would not need any installation, could be well portable allready, but since more exe are involved, launcher will be needed.
Works fine otherwise.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2482
Yes, Top OCR is nice, but as far as I know it is nit open source. And it does a lot of things you do not really need. My word processor is OOo Writer, do not need another one. As I do not need the recognition of the Character set, I use the typeface I want. I believe these things are like this for most of the users.
GOCR is open source, very simple, but it does the work you usually need: transform images representing text into text.
Regarding the scanner: I always used any scanner and sometimes a digital camera, with bith programs.
by the way, I cannot open the link above
The problem isn't find a free or opensource OCR but find one that's good enough in caracter reconnaisons.
I'd tried Gocr and it's really bad.
I'd tried Top OCR and it's quality is little better but really far than good
I'd tried some online service and it's, if possible, worse.
At now only Abby fine reader and OmniPage can give significan usable results.
IT specialist
Writing/book coach
Ghostwriter
Game creator
@lordmax
you are deadly right
the quality of all the free and open apps for ocr is a problem so far, not reaching anywhere near the commercial once.
Yes at home I am using some very old omnipage and this is still better then the top ocr in its latest version, but then, things like omnipage in its current versions will be very difficult to portabilaze (plus legal problems) and the top ocr does something at least.
It looks that if one puts all the apps to one folder, all works fine.
As far as all the speach and sound addons in it, well I would agree that it would be better to try to improve the recognition quality then add such gadgets most people will probably never use anyway.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
if ou want or need to "OCR" something in a situation where you use portable apps, I think it is not so important to have the quality of a professional OCR to do precised mass production app but something which helps you to transform a scanned text into text quickly
http://www.thinstallsoft.com/files/1353/
Thinsoft has a Free OCR program.
There is a paf version available.
Virus Total clears it.
https://www.virustotal.com/
So far this looks OK.
Thinstalled Applications have often been illegally packaged without permission from the authors.
You should avoid them.
If at first you do not succeed, use more sticky tape.
Other option: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/4.0-with-LSTM#400-alpha-... ==> Compiling: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/Compiling#windows
NEOCR (based on Tesserac) - https://sourceforge.net/projects/ne-ocr/?source=directory - NeOCR is a free software based on Tesseract (Open Source OCR Engine) for the Windows operating system. It provides an easy and user-friendly user interface to recognize texts contained in images as well as PDF documents and convert to editable text formats (.txt, .doc, .docx). This product is accessible to Blind and Visually Impaired peoples (tested with NVDA and Narrator).
Don't see it mentioned much but there is an OCR plugin for IrfanView. It does OCR on files of scanned pages. Never tried to see if worked directly with a scanner.
"KADMOS is an easily integrated character recognition software component for professional use and is incorporated in complete packages for recognition solutions of every kind."
http://www.irfanview.info/plugins/kadmos/
Good for at least light OCR. Some dictionaries are available. Probably could download and extract the file to creat a plugin installer.
It adds one file and a folder of files to the IrfanView plugin folder.Maybe someone could create a plugin installer like the existing plugin paf.
Doesnt seem to have been updated recently but quick test and it works with the latest version of IrfanView.