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):

Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gran Canaria to attend this great event and I got lots of good expectations since it’s gonna be my first GUADEC.
I hope to attend many conferences and hang out with fellow Igalians and friends.

A lot of important names in our world of Open Source and particularly, Open Desktop will be there so it can only be great!

I’ll give two talks in there. A lightning talk about my OCR project — OCRFeeder — and another one that gives a practical view on the new Hildon (or “The Fremantle Way”).
By the way, I used ReStructured Text to do my presentation (using the rst2odp script) and save time from using Open Office. You should try it too.

So, thanks to my dear girlfriend everything is packed already (I always think my socks time-traveled to Narnia), the camera battery is charged, presentations are finished and I’m ready to go — I don’t mention my laptop because we’re “symbiotically” connected and where I go “he” goes.

Hope to see you there!

One of the new cool features is OpenGL transitions on presentations!!