gocr (GPL'ed Optical Character Recognition)

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

For those of you with low-volume or occasional OCR requirements, this is
the best effort I've seen so far. There are others on the link page from
this site, some of which I've tried and found very much wanting.

Some impressions (based on a few trials):

1. Takes longer to compile, per program, than almost anything else I've
   ever seen. This is an indicator (not a guarantee) of a high degree of
   complexity in a fairly small amount of code. 

2. The packaging stinks. This is actually good, because this guy is paying
   lots of attention to the core content, not all the froo-furrah. Later he
   can get fancy.

3. A little preprocessing goes a long way, like cutting out letterhead,
   form lines, any "noise". Go into GIMP or something and CUT THEM OUT!

4. Column headings and stuff like that tend to confuse it. Text in
   proportional fonts tends to run words together. fixed fonts like Courier
   seem to process much better. OCR on a Roman font will need a lot of
   correction, Courier much less.

5. OCR'ing a page of typed copy took about 2 minutes on a 233 MHz Pentium;
   (2:30 for a virtually flawless page of Courier). Performance ain't great.
   Who cares? For small volumes, it's livable, for large volumes and production
   apps, there's commercial software, which costs big bux... but then
   there's budget for that on large    projects. This levels the playing
   field a bit.

Whether you spend nothing or thousands for OCR, you still need to proofread, 
although there's generally fewer mistakes at the very pricey end of things.
So far, this does a lot of the easy stuff as well as some really expensive
packages, and it's not even close to release 1.0

gocr looks good enough, as is, for block-level prototyping. For an early
release, this is great stuff!

                                                     Regards,
                                                      ---> RGB <---