[sane-devel] Which scanner for doing good OCR under Linux ?

Karl Heinz Kremer khk@khk.net
Tue, 30 Mar 2004 17:51:07 -0500


I suspect that pretty much any scanner will work for this purpose.
OCR usually works best with monochrome or grayscale data, so any
scanner that can scan in these modes with e.g. 300dpi will work.

I only have first-hand experience with EPSON scanners and OCR, and
all I can say is that the scanner is not the limiting factor: It's
usually the OCR software that limits the quality of the OCR process.
The same image OCR'ed with different software packages gives totally
different results. Unfortunately I have not yet found an OCR
package for Linux that I consider "good enough". I've had very
good results with Abby FineReader on a Mac and with Windows.

Karl Heinz


On Mar 30, 2004, at 5:00 PM, S=E9bastien Hinderer wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I'm blind, and I would like to buy a scanner to read books under =
Linux.
> This scanner should be as fast as possible, and the scanned image=20
> should be
> of sufficient quality to allow an OCR to do a fine job with it.
>
> Apart from DPIs, which parameters can influence the quality of the =
text
> recognition ?
>
> Considering that the price of the scanner does not really matter, =
which
> one, according to you, is suited for doing OCR ?
>
> Thank you very much in advance for your help and suggestions.
>
> Regards,
> S=E9bastien.
>
> --=20
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