png2txt -

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Bob Goodwin USA
<bobgoodwin at wildblue.net> wrote:
> fred smith wrote:
>>>>> Is there an F8 application that will convert a .png copy of a text list
>>>>> to a text file?
>>>>
>>>> ----
>>>> png is a picture file and there is no text.
>>>>
>>>> If you want OCR (optical character recognition - software that scans a
>>>> picture for recognizable text and saves the recognized text to a file),
>>>> I would suggest tesseract.
>>>
>>> Thanks, I will look at that.
>>>
>>
>> I believe that Tesseract only understands TIF files, so you will need
>> to convert the png before you can OCR them.
>>
>>
>
> Yes, I discovered that requirement but now I am stumped by -
>
>   The command line is:
>   tesseract <image.tif> <output> [-l langid]
>
> I thought "-l enUS" might work but no go there.
>
> There's no man page, only a README and that doesn't tell me about the langid
> other than it wants it.  Without it I get very strange looking text.

Unfortunately, the OCR programs working in Linux are not very good
yet. In case you have access to Acrobat Professional, use it instead;
the results are usually excellent.

Paul