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Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

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Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#11

Post by arjie »

contingencies wrote: post #10
Synergyse wrote: post #2

Nice idea, would it be possible to do some OCR at the end?

Take a look at Tesseract, which last time I looked was the best codebase to use in this area. It's part of Google's open source multilingual OCR suite, which is in two parts (layout analysis and actual OCR code being segregated): https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Is there a guide to using tesseract? When I last used it, I had trouble accurately recovering text from an image I just created with Times New Roman. There are probably some settings I'd need to change to get it to work properly.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#13

Post by contingencies »

arjie wrote: post #11
contingencies wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Tesseract, which last time I looked was the best codebase to use in this area. It's part of Google's open source multilingual OCR suite, which is in two parts (layout analysis and actual OCR code being segregated): https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Is there a guide to using tesseract? When I last used it, I had trouble accurately recovering text from an image I just created with Times New Roman. There are probably some settings I'd need to change to get it to work properly.

Not sure. I looked at it years ago, during its early open source stages, and similarly concluded that it was nontrivial to get going. Should be easier now. IIRC in those days it had a very high volume mailing list for user support.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#14

Post by heisenzombie »

Cool! I did something similar just recently for cleaning up scans of my laboratory notes (in a moleskin). I have an Automator action which watches the scan folder, automatically crops/splits the pages and cleans them up, then uploads them into Evernote. Gives me a searchable cloud backup of my lab notes!

Anyway, I cheated by using some of these actions: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/

In particular the "textcleaner" script proved useful.

I'm definitely going to have a look to see if this script offers advantages over my method.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#17

Post by fuzzythinker »

unclesaamm wrote: post #15

I'm having the same issue as magus: https://gist.github.com/lelandbatey/8677901#comment-1204432

github compressed the upload, get the originals from links from his response: https://gist.github.com/lelandbatey/8677901#comment-1204480

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#19

Post by diegocr »

I got excited when i saw the results since they looked awesome, such that I thought I could replace my quick&dirty transparent GIFs script[1], but apparently it has issues with low-resolution images.

[1] : convert -fill none -draw "matte 0,0 floodfill" -type optimize -colors 64 +dither -trim -fuzz 3% +repage -strip $1 $2

Nevertheless, it's a great technique which i've just saved for such specific cases. Thanks!

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