Comments on: Two Interactions With Amazon http://push.cx/2009/two-interactions-with-amazon A tea-drinking web geek's coffee-flavored blog Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:47:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Posts about Text Links as of January 18, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge http://push.cx/2009/two-interactions-with-amazon/comment-page-1#comment-89784 Posts about Text Links as of January 18, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:07:12 +0000 http://push.cx/?p=450#comment-89784 [...] [...] [...] [...]

]]> By: Peter Harkins http://push.cx/2009/two-interactions-with-amazon/comment-page-1#comment-89782 Peter Harkins Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:33:18 +0000 http://push.cx/?p=450#comment-89782 I did a quick <kbd>aptitude search ocr</kbd> and found gocr, ocrad, and tesseract-ocr. I spent an hour or so testing each package with different options on samples from the Clinton Schedule, which I extracted with <kbd>gs -sDEVICE=pnggray -sOutputFile=page.png -r600 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dFirstPage=<i>42</i> -dLastPage=<i>42</i> -f hrcsked.pdf -c quit && convert page.png page00042.tiff</kbd> (I also used ImageMagick to crop the image down and got better results because there wasn't the staticy margins, but I can't immediately find my notes on that and the IM docs explain how to do it.) I found that tesseract worked best, but I strongly suspect that the different ocr programs will rank differently depending on the material. I did a quick aptitude search ocr and found gocr, ocrad, and tesseract-ocr. I spent an hour or so testing each package with different options on samples from the Clinton Schedule, which I extracted with

gs -sDEVICE=pnggray -sOutputFile=page.png -r600 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dFirstPage=42 -dLastPage=42 -f hrcsked.pdf -c quit && convert page.png page00042.tiff (I also used ImageMagick to crop the image down and got better results because there wasn’t the staticy margins, but I can’t immediately find my notes on that and the IM docs explain how to do it.)

I found that tesseract worked best, but I strongly suspect that the different ocr programs will rank differently depending on the material.

]]> By: Simon Willison http://push.cx/2009/two-interactions-with-amazon/comment-page-1#comment-89777 Simon Willison Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:35:43 +0000 http://push.cx/?p=450#comment-89777 A bit off topic for the post, but I'd love to know what software you use for processing scanned documents on EC2 :) A bit off topic for the post, but I’d love to know what software you use for processing scanned documents on EC2 :)

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