I have been hacking on some new and cool features on OCRFeeder for a while and now it is time to show them to the world in a new release.

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

Grilo is getting really interesting and one of its newest nice things is the DBUS interface Juan has been working on lately.

This DBUS interface is currently known as Rygel-Grilo (it was originally intended to be a source for Rygel) and uses the MediaServerSpec to allow developers to retrieve the media objects Grilo provides.

Since there aren’t still Python bindings for Grilo, I decided to use the Rygel-Grilo to be able to use Grilo from Python.
So I developed a Rhythmbox plugin that shows every MediaServer1 object available and lets the use browse through the contents of these. Needless to say, although this plugin provides a very generic basic and usage, it’s easy to see how applications like Rhythmbox could be using Grilo to get their media.
The philosophy is: Grilo gives you content, GStreamer plays that content, and you’re free to focus in the rest of your app’s details.

Here’s a video of Rygel-Grilo and the Rhythmbox MediaServer1 plugin in action:

Grilo MediaServer1 Rhythmbox Plugin from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

You can find this plugin under the MediaServer1 Plugins project on Gitorious.

Juan did also developed a cool plugin for Totem similar to this one. Take a look at this post to see the plugin working and a more detailed explanation of what Rygel-Grilo is.

It’s been a while since last SeriesFinale’s version and I have been a bit busy meanwhile but still got time, together with Juan, to pull up some nice new features. In the end, we had so many changes and the app felt so smooth that we nicknamed it “Xmas Comes Earlier”!

So what can you find in this new version?

* The covers are now downloaded in the background which allows users to keep using the application and improves idle times when adding/updating shows.
* No more database deletions. Many people complained that sometimes it would suddenly delete all the database. We have now introduced a few verifications that make it harder for the database to be deleted unless you do it yourself.
* The format of the JSON of the database and the way the serialization is done is now faster which allows faster load and save times.
* The impossibility to delete shows is also fixed.
* No more problems with characters like & on the episodes and shows’ names.
* Already added shows are now marked with color when searching for shows.
* The highlight of episodes is now fixed, when marking them.
* A new logo that works in a black background has been added.
* Images are now downloaded to temporary files which allows a safer assignment to the shows/seasons.
* The images are now deleted if it’s not being used anymore (when shows are deleted), and are not downloaded more than once (when a show is added twice).
* The removal of the application now deletes the images folder.
* AUTHORS, README and THANKS files were added to the package.
* Translations were updated.
* The search dialog now allows you to search shows in a chosen language.
* The About dialog was added. Here are a few screenshots:

Shows when no cover has been added

Temporary image when downloading cover

Search dialog with Language choices

About dialog

Two other things that are new are the creation of two mailing lists for SeriesFinale:
seriesfinale-general for general discussion, help and feature requests
seriesfinale-development for discussions related to features development and bug tracking

You should be able to upgrade SeriesFinale from the extras-devel repository. I’ll promote it extras later.

Enjoy!

Last Friday I gave an introduction to Python as class in Master in Free Software.
In this session I tried to cover Python from the very basics to decorators, properties and PDB. All covered only as an overview, not in deep detail.

After the introduction we did a simple PyGTK application to list the files from a folder the user gives it; it will hopefully come in handy when they start to develop their project’s UI.

So I’m sharing here the presentation I created for it. If you’re thinking of learning Python or have started learning it recently it might be helpful for you.

OCRFeeder version 0.6.6 has been released.

This version has no big improvements and exists mainly to introduce the fix of a bug that prevented using the algorithm for recognizing documents automatically.

The copyright was updated to include the proper copyright and license notices of ODFPy, which ships with OCRFeeder.
It also features some improvements to Debian related files (thanks to Alberto Garcia, who is creating the official deb package for Debian) and a few translation updates.

See the whole list of changes here.

Your usual links:
OCRFeeder’s git
OCRFeeder’s bugzilla
OCRFeeder’s Tarball from GNOME’s FTP
OCRFeeder 0.6.6 Debian package