Scanning and OCR with Mint

[alfreddo]

Using my Windows XP PC, I scan images from my Epson V350 into Paintshop Pro, and documents (typed or duplicated) using the OCR program Abbyy Finereader 6.
What would be the best equivalents using Mint? I've read that the Epson V350 Linux driver is not easy to use and will only scan to 2400 dpi instead iof the 4800 dpi available on Windows. Perhaps I should think of buying a new scanner to work with Mint - if so, which scanner would you recommend.
Paintshop Pro isn't available in Linux. Can I scan using Gimp? Scanning isn't mentioned in the Gimp help files. If not Gimp, then what?
Abbyy Finereader does an excellent job of producing editable text from old stencil duplicated originals, but also isn't available in Linux. Can you recommend a competent OCR program to use with Mint.

Many thanks. I'm hoping to move from XP to Mint completely, but not unless the scanning issue can be resolved.

[kwisher]

Xsane is a good scanning application. I believe it will do OCR also.

[DrHu]

Abbyy Finereader does an excellent job of producing editable text from old stencil duplicated originals, but also isn't available in Linux. Can you recommend a competent OCR program to use with Mint.

OCR..
--try a few different engines on your source material to determine for yourself which works best, as different sources will produce different results across the board..

• p tesseract-ocr - Command line OCR tool
  p tesseract-ocr-eng - tesseract-ocr language files for English t

--I don't know if you need the language files or not, it is originally a German product..
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Scanning..
mint menu>All Applications>Graphics>Scanner Utility
http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-scan/index
http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... thats.html

There is a gimp plug-in to acquire (scan) into gimp
--however you can use any application that works to scan and maniplulate the image within Gimp..
In Terminal, check

• apt search gimp
  p gimp2.0-quiteinsane - A Qt based SANE plugin for GIMP 2.0

An ocr scan is a separate problem, in Linux there are several OCR engines available
--translating a page from text/image and extracting the text content..
In Terminal, check

• apt search ocr
  p gocr - A command line OCR
  p ocrad - Optical Character Recognition program

These are the two that are usually included with sane scanning package or the graphical scanning package on the desktop

[alfreddo]

Many thanks for the suggestions. I'll let you know the outcome.

[lexon]

I have scanned with Xsane but when I try to convert to text, the results are quite lousy. No solution.

lexon

[julianvb]

Has anyone used gocr, a command line OCR application. When I try it with a couple of simple recipes, I see no system errors but the results are just a bunch of random characters. I first converf the jpg file to pnm using convert since gocr requires pnm as one of the input formats.

Because it's so simple to use, I really would like to see it work in Lnux Mint 17 for me. Any help will be appreciated.

julianvb

[julianvb]

I think I am very satisfied with Tesseract as an OCR as it is simple to use and its performance is more than adequate for me. It is such a pleasure to edit its output with LibreOffice writer. In no time I end up with an excellent .odt text file. I highly recommend it to any Linux user.

In case one is new to Tesseract in LInux after installing it, one only needs to convert the image file to .tif format and then issue the following command:

tesseract filename.tif filename

julianvb

[Bolle1961]

I use ocrfeeder (uses tesseract as backend) and that works good.

[jamesd1]

Here is a good solution, simple to use, easy to install:

https://danpla.github.io/dpscreenocr/