Away for scouting, further development

[Étienne Bersac]

Hi all,

You know i'm Gnome Scan developer. This summer, i applied to Google
Summer of Code. I have to implement OCR in gnome-scan. OCRopus is the
best solution if found, but that's a very early technologie. That's not
a problem for gnome-scan since it also uses Gegl SVN.

For Gnome Scan, i would like to have a C API for OCRopus, exposing at
least basic scan feature : pass a file/file descriptor and get the HTML
result/file. It would be nice to allow preview of layout analysis and
such in order to build a dialog for user-fix of OCR.

starting from 10th, i'll be away for scouting. As you saw, i can be a
bit involved in OCRopus and even tesseract if needed. I found thoses
project a bit inactive, but with really cool developers (that's true, i
didn't get such welcome in other projects …).

Can i hope to get some improvement in OCRopus in order to include it in
Gnome Scan for end august ? I plan 0.6 release for Christmas (hopefully
in time for Gnome 2.22). That's still a "technology preview". I'm pretty
certain that Gnome Scan is a huge opportunity for OCRopus to get more
love. The holy graal for this summer is a preliminary Abiword OCR
plugin. What Gnome Scan needs form OCRopus are :

* Packaging of a development snapshot/release
* A preliminary C API with basic OCR parameters and progress
monitoring.

I'll be back for 27th, could you make some improvments in this area so i
could work forward in Gnome Scan ? :)

Best regards,
Étienne.
--
Verso l'Alto !

[Thomas Breuel]

You know i'm Gnome Scan developer. This summer, i applied to Google
Summer of Code. I have to implement OCR in gnome-scan. OCRopus is the
best solution if found, but that's a very early technologie.

Great!

For Gnome Scan, i would like to have a C API for OCRopus, exposing at
least basic scan feature : pass a file/file descriptor and get the HTML
result/file. It would be nice to allow preview of layout analysis and
such in order to build a dialog for user-fix of OCR.

We're thinking about a C API, also for making building a Windows DLL easier and interfacing with Python.  Let's see how it fits into the project schedule.

Why do you need a C API for Gnome Scan?  Is Gnome Scan actually written in plain C, or do you need it for some other reason?

starting from 10th, i'll be away for scouting. As you saw, i can be a
bit involved in OCRopus and even tesseract if needed. I found thoses
project a bit inactive, but with really cool developers (that's true, i

didn't get such welcome in other projects ...).

Can i hope to get some improvement in OCRopus in order to include it in
Gnome Scan for end august ? I plan 0.6 release for Christmas (hopefully
in time for Gnome 2.22). That's still a "technology preview". I'm pretty
certain that Gnome Scan is a huge opportunity for OCRopus to get more
love. The holy graal for this summer is a preliminary Abiword OCR
plugin. What Gnome Scan needs form OCRopus are :

      * Packaging of a development snapshot/release
      * A preliminary C API with basic OCR parameters and progress
        monitoring.

I'll be back for 27th, could you make some improvments in this area so i
could work forward in Gnome Scan ? :)

Tesseract 2.0 is scheduled for release fairly soon; we'll probably package OCRopus against that, since the Tesseract API will be changing significantly as well and there isn't much point in doing the work twice.

Cheers,
Thomas.

[Étienne Bersac]

Hi,

> Why do you need a C API for Gnome Scan? Is Gnome Scan actually
> written in plain C, or do you need it for some other reason?

Gnome Scan is written in C/GObject, just like Gegl. python binding are
planned, and maybe, python plugin support, but that's far from today
issue :)

> Tesseract 2.0 is scheduled for release fairly soon;

Good news !

See you later :)

Regards,