Although last year I also attended GUADEC, this year was like a first time to me as last year’s GUADEC was co-located with aKademy forming Gran Canaria Desktop summit and it felt different.

What do I think of this year’s? Javascript, web, introspection and shell, that’s what I think.
This is GNOME’s new route, making desktop development more webbish and it is seems like a smart one too. Now, I don’t really fall for Javascript, I think it’s ugly and not really the best choice (imho) for large projects but anyway that’s the beauty of GObject Introspection, in the future it should be easy to use whatever language one prefers.

As for the talks, I really enjoyed Luis Villa’s keynote. Xan and Fernando did a great job getting the tragedy that some times the Foundation’s mailing list is and turning it into a comedy.
Iago gave a good talk about Grilo and Juan complemented it in a lightning talk about the plugins we did using Rygel-grilo.

This year I gave again a lightening talk, this time about the Predictor Input Method which you might one day use in a mobile device or on the desktop itself if you need assisted typing. There must be a GUADEC’s rule saying that the laptop where people present the lightening talks must be a crappy netbook that takes 2 seconds before it changes a slide…

For an overall feeling of GUADEC, you can check out Victor’s post covering GUADEC, I agree totally with him.

I could also meet and chat with nice people like Eitan Isaacson, Patricia and others.

So let’s see how the projects presented in GUADEC evolve and wait GUADEC 2011 in Berlin.

And what this week? This week I’m on vacation doing an InterRail across a bunch of European countries together with my girlfriend. I visited Paris already, where I found out my french is good enough for basic stuff. Today we’re in Brussels, it’s my third time here but the first one as a turist. I’m sure the beers will taste as marvellous as always.

I’m also doing a new thing: travelling without my laptop, the N900 seems to be a perfect replacement, I (still?) love this gadget and it surelly spares some space in my backpack.

See you in some European city, I’m likely to be wearing a GNOME/Linux/Metal t-shirt… what else is new…?

These features I’m talking about fall mainly in 2 areas: improving the a11y of the UI and improving the recognition of documents.

A11y Improvement

The improvement of the a11y has the typical UI changes to include mnemonics, missing labels and relations, but also other approaches that have more to do with UX like using a progress dialog to inform users that time-taking operations are being carried. This means that now, the PDF importation and OCR won’t block the UI.
Other changes in this category were the navigation through the content boxes (before, these could only be selected by clicking on them), the selection of all boxes and the deletion of selected boxes.

The following screenshot shows the box editor area of OCRFeeder with its mnemonics highlighted:

Box edition area

Recognition Improvements

Sometimes, text columns are so close to each other that they end up being recognized as a single paragraph, so I added a post-detection method to solve this issue. This feature is optional and can be toggled from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s an example of the difference it makes:

Before columns' detection improvements

After columns' detection improvements

Scanned document images are usually skewed and this makes it more difficult for the contents to be successfully detected and “OCRed”. I decided to implement an algorithm to deskew these images. The algorithm uses the Hough transform to try to find lines in the image and their angles and, while it is a bit slow, it works well:

Skewed image

Deskewed image

This action can be used in a loaded image but can also be configured to be automatically performed before the images are added. The Unpaper tool can now also be set to be clean images before adding them.
This makes it much easier to successfully recognize images obtained from a scanner device.

Some fine tunning of the content boxes’ bounds was done by trying to shorten their margins, that is, lowering the distance between the boxes and their actual contents.

The font size recognition was also tweaked to solve the problem of having paragraphs with initials (you know, the huge starting characters) which were influencing the whole paragraphs’ font size.

To finish the recognition’s improvements, I have added an optional action to find and fix the text’s line breaks. Usually, OCR engines don’t consider “semantic line-breaks”, that is, OCR engines always insert a newline in the end of each line.
Using some regular expressions, I try to find these “fake” line-breaks and recover the original flow of the text. Like some of the features mentioned above, this one can also be turned on/off from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s how the Preferences dialog looks like now:

To finish, images can now be dragged and dropped onto the pages’ area and the mouse wheel can be used to scroll horizontally combining it with the Shift key, thanks to Stefan Löffler, and of course, several bugs were corrected and code was improved.

As you see, this is a “rich” new version of OCRFeeder that keeps being the easiest way to use OCR in a desktop. You are welcome to file bugs in bugzilla or to send patches and features’ requests to its mailing list or approaching me if you’re in GUADEC.

Download: OCRFeeder 0.7 tarball on GNOME FTP

Between hacking on OCRFeeder (expect a new version soon), giving a talk about it, attending nice presentations and chatting with people, I had a great time.
Diego’s presentation about Epiphany was simply epic and Mario gave a very complete crash course of git.

I guess there’s a first time for these things but Thursday, while I was giving a demo of the new OCRFeeder’s features, it crashed on me… Never again will I laugh at Mr. Gates and friends when their products freeze out of the blue (nah, it is too funny).
Now that I think of it… was this the first time a Portuguese man gave a talk at GUADEC Hispana?

The presentation was a cut-down version of the one I gave at FOSDEM this year and you can check its slides below (it’s in Spanish):

(thanks to Manuel Rego for reviewing my Spanish in the slides)

Here’s the group photo of the GUADEC ES attendants:

And from next Monday on, I’ll be in Den Haag for GUADEC 2010. My lightening talk about the Predictor Input Method got accepted, so if you’re into this kind of stuff, I hope to see you there.

My fellow Igalians Iago, Alejandro Piñeiro and José Dapena will give talks about Grilo, Cally and Modest 4, respectively.

As for me, I’m hoping my lightening talk about Text Prediction on GNOME gets accepted.

So, as usual, if you wanna talk about GNOME, OCR, Input Methods, Grilo, Django or Free Software in general and have beer while we’re on it, come along!

Hope to see you in Den Haag.

At the beginning, I thought it’d be a little difficult (I thought I’d need a lot of stuff)
So I installed libgoocanvas-dev, checked out pygoocanvas and compiled it (I also needed to manually copy the generated egg from Python 2.3’s site-packages to Python 2.5’s). After that, no OCR engines available so I installed OCRAD which was pretty easy. I also decided to give a shot at installing Tesseract which went wrong supposedly due to a broken make file or something but this week that problem was fixed and now Tesseract works like a charm!

I’m not thinking of porting OCRFeeder to Maemo (it is an office application that wouldn’t be very easy to use on a device nor it makes sense to want to do that kind of office task in a mobile device) but it was indeed nice to see how easy it is to make a GNOME application written in Python to work on it.

OCR can have many interesting applications in a mobile device and I got a few ideas stashed in a corner of my memory so, if the time allows, I’ll try to put some to practice in the future.

Here are some screenshots of OCRFeeder and the result ODT document (yes, the ODFPy modules worked fine as well):