extracting text from png files

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Thanks much, I've got both packages on my system so now it's time to
read some manuals and search for youtube tutorials to fill in the
missing pieces to learn these two packages.  I didn't know these could
handle png files.

On Mon, 17 Dec 2018, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:

> Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:03:23
> From: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com>
> To: blinux-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: extracting text from png files
>
> What you're looking for is Ocular Character Recognition or OCR for short.
>
> I've never managed to figure out its command line syntax, but I
> believe tesseract is considered the current standard option for Linux.
>
> There's also Cuneiform, which I have actually used with some success
> in the past, but I believe its either contrib or non-free under
> Debian, so you might need to enable extra repositories depending on
> how strict your distro is about sticking to FOSS principles.
>
> I will warn you, in my experience, OCR is as likely to produce
> gibberish as legible text. A scan of a page of prose type set in a
> standard font will probably OCR well, but the more mixed text is with
> graphics, the fancier the font, and the more complicated the page
> layout, the more likely errors are. I've tried OCR'ing scanlated
> manga(Japanese comics) in the past and have gotten results that
> included unpredictible patterns of letters and numbers misidentified
> as others(S and 5, P and D, I and 1, LI and U, B and g where just some
> of the common substitutions I encountered trying to fix the OCR'd
> text), characters my screenreader could'nt identify or identified as
> characters I'm unfamiliar, and even when the text was clear,
> paragraphs out of order wasn't uncommon.
>
>

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