Good news
November 28, 2006
Hi all,
After quite some time of hibernation, i wake up the development process of Gnome Scan. Gnome Scan hit the 100th revision ! This revision is the first contributed patch Olaf Leidinger. It added –disable-gnome option for xfce people and other. I’m also very pleased to see news Swedish translation and nearby Dutch translation
Gnome Scan seems to spread more and more. How surprised where i to see that Foresight Linux 0.9.4 include Gnome Scan/Flegita ! Gnome Scan 0.3.1 is now in feisty/universe. I even saw unofficial ebuild. A bunch of people talk about Gnome Scan all around the web in French and German (some consider it as a good replacement of xsane, i find Gnome Scan in a too early stage to fully replace xsane).
Emmanuel Fleury, associate professor at Bordeau-I university, submitted Gnome-OCR project to its student. The project will start in January. The idea is to link tesseract-OCR and Gnome Scan. I wish this project will end up with an Abiword plugin. Even if i mainly work on flegita, the purpose of Gnome Scan is not a standalone app, but flegita is the first step. As long as Gnome Scan has no stable API, i don’t want to provide too many unmanagable plugins. I don’t want to end up with 7.0.0 libtool version for gnome-scan 1.0 :).
I guess that 0.3.2 will arrive as Chrismas gift to the FOSS world :). It will include nice features that may make Gnome Scan a reasonable replacement of xsane for basic end user.
So yes, Gnome Scan is still alive ! And very active !
Étienne.
November 28, 2006 at 10:09 pm
This is really awesome, and I’m very excited knowing that you have some backing from an institution, and that we might someday have proper OCR in the FOSS world. You guys rock.
December 19, 2006 at 9:27 am
This project looks great! GNOME needs an easy scan program. Thanks for the work!
January 23, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Well, actually I hope, that Gnome-OCR will not be tied to one particular OCR engine. While the Tesseract may be excellent sollution for english text, I think I’ve read somewhere it cannot do much about unicode texts. So it would be better to let the user choose e.g. gocr, which outputs directly to the utf-8. Also there are specialized ocr engines like hocr for hebrew, that does what another opensource OCR cannot for this langugage. (And I think there is a project to create special arabic OCR engine on the Arabeyes). So please don’t stick with one particullar sollution! Thanks!
January 23, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Hi,
GnomeScan will use Gnome OCR for OCR. GnomeOCR should use GStreamer plugins for OCR. So writing a plugin using one or another OCR tool is easy.
Of course, i don’t want to be bound to one OCR engine. Ocrad, Gocr, hocr are example of alternative free OCR.