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2012-08-03 Free French OCR for Mac

Once again I’ve decided I needed to work on the memoirs of my grandfather Roland Li-Marchetti. I had digitized 16 pages many years ago but his memoirs contain a total of 45 pages of typed text. The last time I worked on this, I was using the OCR software that came with my scanner (a cheap Canon LiDE 25) – but today the scanner was no longer recognized by the operating system. I faintly remember having experienced this before when I upgraded my system. Bit rot!

Anyway, I was in the mood to try something new. Free Software?

  1. Tesseract
  2. requires Leptonica
  3. and I needed to install GNU Libtool because I was getting an error: “Libtool library used but `LIBTOOL’ is undefined. The usual way to define `LIBTOOL’ is to add `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL’ to `configure.ac’ and run `aclocal’ and `autoconf’ again. If `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL’ is in `configure.ac’, make sure its definition is in aclocal’s search path.”

(While the stuff is compiling, I am in fact using a free online OCR service.)

Here is the original, taken with my Pentax K100D, loaded into Gimp, rotated, cropped, and auto-adjusted levels.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8154/7703476934_8e4cde0f8b_z.jpg

The tesseract output is pretty cool:

que mes vingt prochaines années soient aussi riches d'aventures
et de bonheur auprès des miens, main dans la main avec Agnès mon
inséparable complice qui a beaucoup sacrifié et que j'espère
pouvoir encore rendre heureuse.

(When I tried it on a direct photo of the page the result was far less pleasing.)

Yay!

for ((i=20; i<=46; i++)); do
    tesseract IMGP$((5210+$i)).JPG "page-$i" -l fra
done

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