As has become usual every couple of weeks or so, I released a new version of OCRFeeder!
This is version 0.6.1 and the main changes this time are:
* Now you can increase or decrease the zoom using Ctrl+Mouse wheel. This kind of shortcut is well known in many GNOME applications and even I was missing it;
* Warning dialogs are now shown when something went wrong while opening an image;
* Fixed encoding problem when reading non-ASCII characters;
* Fixed error when configuring a new engine;
* Improved Debian package’s files (thanks to Alberto Garcia)
* Fixed zoom issues (sometimes the allowed zoom would not be consistent among tries);
It was a good week on OCRFeeder’s bug tracker, specially thanks to user Hank who reported important problems.
I am really glad about how OCRFeeder is turning out and I expect to make it even better with the help of its users, either by sending suggestions, reporting bugs or simply by using it you will be helping the project.
You can download OCRFeeder 0.6.1 tarball from GNOME FTP or optionally download a Debian package directly.
This new version introduces the following changes:
* Hide import pdf and unpaper menus if the respective commands are not available
* Several code improvements
* Removed Studio from the application name
* Removed unneeded engines folder
* Lowered the package name font case
* Updated copyright notice on the about dialog
* Swedish translation (thanks to Daniel Nylander)
Another very important change is that I moved the development of OCRFeeder to the GNOME infrastructure.
This means I’m using GNOME’s git server and will soon use GNOME Bugzilla to track bugs.
I always thought of OCRFeeder as a unique Free Software application (in the way that there isn’t anyone similar to it) and that it would be great to get it more involved with our favorite desktop environment.
I’d like to thank Claudio for supporting me on this move.
It’s been a while since I wrote my last post but I guess this one will compensate.
When I posted about how I made OCRFeeder run in Fremantle I said I wasn’t thinking of porting the application but in later talks with some people, it was clear that OCRFeeder might come in handy for some people.
One of the use cases that we have talked about was to be able to create a contact in the address book by recognizing the contact fields from a business card.
So, for some days in these last weeks, I’ve been porting OCRFeeder to Fremantle!
(The card-to-contact feature is still to come as I wanted to have OCRFeeder “fremantelized” before)
New Respository
I had been using git-svn to develop OCRFeeder and while this was okay when there was just a branch (trunk), with the Maemo version it was clear that Google Code’s SVN repository wasn’t enough. (Yes, I know they have mercurial but I’m git user)
So, yesterday I relocated OCRFeeder’s development to Gitorious where you’ll find the branch “maemo” besides the “master” one: http://gitorious.org/ocrfeeder
Development Notes
I must say that although I had for a long time used PyGTK for my UI code, on Hildon, I am more experienced in using C. While from the theory part this is the same, on the practical side, the PyMaemo bindings had some issues that delayed the development a bit (mainly undocumented functions that differ from the direct and expected usage, as well as some bugs I found).
I must thank Lizardo and other PyMaemo folks who were kind enough to help me every time I bugged them with questions and suggestions.
I think OCRFeeder for Maemo represents another example of how a desktop targetted application can be ported to Fremantle, specially from the design point of view. The chats I had with my friend and colleague Felipe (who, by the way, has just become a Master degree student in a in User-Centered Interactive Technologies) surelly helped in this matter.
Trying OCRFeeder for Maemo
Now, you can try to use OCRFeeder but you’ll have to first compile and install pygoocanvas and Tesseract or another OCR engine like I wrote here. I hope I have time to create deb packages for both pygoocanvas and Tesseract as they’re also very useful apps to have.
As a final note, I must say that although everything was working fine on Maemo 5.0 SDK beta 2, today the final SDK was released and I tested OCRFeeder on it… and not everything works well as before. The problems are mainly related to GtkTreeViews (Hildon style) which, from the C side seem to be working okay, but from the PyMaemo side seems not to obey the selection mode I assign to it.
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):
