[X4U] Mac OCR

[Stroller]

On Jul 27, 2004, at 4:16 am, Jim Eddy wrote:

> My wife needs to scan in some short articles onto a web site for her 
> university classes. I tried to fire up the copy of Omnipage that came 
> with an older scanner, but it seems to be broken now (the software and 
> the scanner). We have a Canon LiDE scanner now that works pretty well. 
> OmniPage now sells for $500. Any suggestions for other OCR programs 
> for OSX -- hopefully for around $100?

Your question interested me, so I started looking to see if there was a 
Free OCR available on OS X.

I don't suppose your wife really wants to go messing about at the 
command-line for this task - I would imagine the process would involve 
scanning to a bitmap & typing something like `gocr --some --bunch --of 
--options /path/to/some.bmp` at the terminal - but it seems that gocr 
is available in fink & is reported to be "reasonably usable".

If you don't get any other suggestions, this could save you $500.

I think I shall use some of my Copious Free Time to knock up a sweet 
Cocoa front-end to gocr & package it as an.app.
HEALTH WARNING: don't hold your breath.

Stroller.