[macvoiceover] Re: Maybe OT: another scanning solution

I can't get this to work reliably the OCR application report it can not open the TIFF file. 

Greg Kearney
Curtin University Centre for Accessible Technology
www.cucat.org

On Sep 29, 2008, at 2:53 PM, Josh de Lioncourt wrote:


Hi Greg,

I think a GUI interface for this would be excellent. :)



Josh de Lioncourt
Mac-cessibility: http://www.Lioncourt.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Lioncourt
"Beauty was a savage garden, so why should it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty?" 
        The Vampire Lestat--Anne Rice



On Sep 29, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:


I could write a GUI for this if anyone wants it

Greg Kearney
Curtin University Centre for Accessible Technology
www.cucat.org

On Sep 29, 2008, at 2:21 PM, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
For anybody finding that readiris and/or vuescan are not working for some reason, there is an option in the terminal using macports. This only works with supported scanners, of which the canoscan lide 60 is one but the lide 90 unfortunately is not. You will have to check for your individual scanner. My lide 60 is actually covered in the genesys conf file because it is usb and the other supported canons are not. You may have to do some research to find out whether or not your scanner is supported. 

1. Install macports from www.macports.org
2. Install the macports ports for twain-sane, sane-backends and tesseract. You don't need xsane.
3. Make sure the Macosx driver for your scanner is NOT installed (at least for lide 60 and probably others).
4. Plug in scanner. Pick something to scan and place it in the scanner oriented correctly. For my scanner this meant facedown with top and bottom oriented correctly. You'll get nothing but gibberish if the orientation is wrong. 

5. Type
scanimage --format=tiff > scanfile.tif

6. If the scanner runs and finishes successfully type:

tesseract scan.tif textfile

6. If this completes without errors, open textfile.txt in textedit.

Notes:
The file names I've given are just examples. Tesseract needs to see a .tif extension to run the file but it will supply the .txt on the end of the output file. Even though the file format is tiff the extension you need is .tif with only one f.
The scans you will get will vary in quality. An envelope had lots of extraneous junk but I was able to find the relevant information; the bill inside the envelope was readable but again had extraneous stuff. A page from a book scanned quite well. There are, however, lots of formatting needs that tesseract doesn't handle at this poit. But if you just want to find out what your mail is and be able to read it to some extent or you want to scan book pages, it should be adequate if your scanner is supported. One big incentive of this method is that it won't cost you any money.
You MUST either have the page oriented correctly or do scans with the page in various orientations to get a scan with anything legible.
If you have trouble running scanimage as a user, you can try using sudo or su to do this as root. You can also try: 

chmod +s /opt/local/bin/scanimage
I had no problem with this in Macports but did have a problem with it on my linux machine. 



--
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."



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