Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

GOCR

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Developer(s)
  
Jörg Schulenburg

Operating system
  
Linux, Windows, OS/2

Written in
  
C

Initial release
  
December 2000; 16 years ago (2000-12)

Stable release
  
0.50 / March 5, 2013; 4 years ago (2013-03-05)

Type
  
Optical character recognition

GOCR (or JOCR) is a free optical character recognition program, initially written by Jörg Schulenburg. It can be used to convert or scan image files (portable pixmap or PCX) into text files.

Contents

Features

GOCR claims it can handle single-column sans-serif fonts of 20–60 pixels in height. It reports trouble with serif fonts, overlapping characters, handwritten text, heterogeneous fonts, noisy images, large angles of skew, and text in anything other than a Latin alphabet.

GOCR can also translate barcodes.

User interface

GOCR can be used as a stand-alone command-line application, or as a back-end to other programs. It comes with a gocr.tcl graphic interface. GOCR can be also used as an OCR engine in OCRFeeder.

Development

Version 0.3.0 was released in December 2000, 0.3.5 in February 2002, and 0.37 in August 2002.

Between version 0.40 (March 2005) and 0.43 (December 2006), the recognition engine was gradually replaced with a vector version.

Version 0.48 was released in August 2009.

Version 0.49 was released in September 2010.

Version 0.50 was released in March 2013.

Nomenclature

The application was originally named GOCR which stands for GNU Optical Character Recognition. When it came time to register the project on SourceForge the name GOCR was already taken so the project was registered as JOCR (Jörg's Optical Character Recognition).

As a result of this situation the project and application are known as both GOCR and JOCR. Schulenburg admits that this is problematic.

Formats

Acceptable image formats are:

  • PNM
  • PBM
  • PGM
  • PPM
  • PCX (some)
  • TGA
  • Other formats are automatically converted using netpbm-progs, gzip and bzip2 via the use of a unix pipe. These images types include:

  • pnm.gz
  • pnm.bz2
  • PNG
  • JPG
  • TIFF
  • GIF
  • BMP
  • References

    GOCR Wikipedia