Ocrad - The GNU OCR

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Introduction

GNU Ocrad is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program based on a feature extraction method. It reads images in pbm (bitmap), pgm (greyscale) or ppm (color) formats and produces text in byte (8-bit) or UTF-8 formats.

Also includes a layout analyser able to separate the columns or blocks of text normally found on printed pages.

Ocrad can be used as a stand-alone console application, or as a backend to other programs.

Documentation

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info ocrad to access the Ocrad section directly.

Downloading

Released versions of GNU Ocrad can be found in the subdirectory /gnu/ocrad/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain Ocrad, please read How to get GNU Software. The latest released version will be the latest version available here at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ocrad/.

Old versions (and sometimes the latest version if upload to http://ftp.gnu.org/ gets delayed for some reason) can be found at http://savannah.gnu.org/download/ocrad/.

Testing versions of alpha releases can be found on the alpha release server. A different server is used for alpha releases so that people do not confuse testing snapshots and released versions. Alpha test versions are available at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/ocrad/.

How to Get Help

For general discussion of bugs in Ocrad the mailing list bug-ocrad@gnu.org is the most appropriate forum. Please send messages as plain text. Please do not send messages encoded as HTML nor encoded as base64 MIME nor included as multiple formats. Please include a descriptive subject line. If all of the subject are "bug in ocrad" it is impossible to differentiate them.

An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ocrad.

How to Help

To contact the maintainers, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to bug-ocrad@gnu.org. Please send messages as plain text. If posting patches they should be in unified diff format against the latest alpha testing version. They should include a text description and the unified diff inline in the message and not attached to it.

Donations

Developing OCR software is neither easy nor cheap. If you are in a position to financially support the development of GNU Ocrad, please, contact the author or donate via PayPal. You can also make a donation to the Free Software Foundation.
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Updated: $Date: 2006/02/17 11:26:28 $ $Author: antonio $