Any recommended OCR software for Linux?

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by gmw

Considering the overlap between *nix, Windows and Apple/Mac, with it being so much easier these days to develop for any/all, and especially when considering the various VM options, the software "choice" argument is running pretty dry. About the only shortfall left is legally running Mac software via a *nix or Windows host, but the other combinations are fine.

Starting to feel like an old fart talking about the goode olde days and having to walk to school: up-hill both ways, in the snow while dodging dinosaurs. You kids have it so much easier these days.

Fair point about VM options. Though it won't cover Auto hot key for example, or games; or maybe heavy duty programs like image editing behomoths? And again, wine etc may not be an easy option for the less skilled user. It's adds a layer of complexity some will find hard to navigate. And of course it will on occasion produce execution issues, agagain, something some people will find hard. Just saying, the need for knowledge quotient is rising. So fair point, but I disagree. Vm and running windows apps in Linux does not dismiss my end user / system point.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by rcentros

I'm a big fan of Mint. I've been using it exclusively for about 13 years now.

Yes, it, and its desktop flavors, even has a tasty name. The geek and the lover of shiny things in me feels the draw.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Yes you did? Did you read your post? You said you want it to look like a dark mode ASCII text editor. That's what every text editor looks like in tty.

I said look like ascii, but also include rich text features such as bold, italics, etc. Also want different fonts, colored fonts, subscript etc.

[Pajamaman]

@rcentros.

(Sorry about the rambling.)

Not at all. Most interesting. I am also a path of least resistance person, but I also want feature rich when I need it.
Emacs was designed for programmer-types, kinda like Linux? Unix was never meant to be for end users?

A more general note, I wonder how many of you folks have access to Windows when you need it. If you do, what do you use Windows for?

[pazos]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Emacs was designed for programmer-types, kinda like Linux? Unix was never meant to be for end users?

Unix was a son of its age. Computer operators were more skilled in the 70's. The concept of piping results from a program to another one was kind of revolutionary.

Nowadays that doesn't hold true and Unix-like systems are meant for end users. You can ask millions of Android/iOS/mac/chromebook users.

What happens to "Linux" as we know it is the lack of multi-zillion companies pushing money to its Desktop experience.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Unix was never meant to be for end users?

Four secretaries in the patent department at Bell Labs used it in the '70s.

https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs12...t/finalhis.htm

A more general note, I wonder how many of you folks have access to Windows when you need it.

Don't have access to microsoft software and don't need it.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Four secretaries in the patent department at Bell Labs used it in the '70s.

Which meant that they were using ed. Gawd, those poor secretaries. There probably aren't many here who've used ed and so can't relate. I have no idea what alternatives they could have used; maybe teco on a DECsystem 10; it was sort of the precursor to emacs. Or maybe they could have used something on an IBM mainframe.

If you've read that Bell Systems Technical Journal that's devoted to Unix (an issue that was done in the 1970s or thereabouts) you can see that Unix wasn't designed for regular end users, it was more of a research project. Bell Labs at that time was sort of like Google today, everyone had a PhD and was very smart. Unix was simply amazing compared to the clunky operating systems from those days.

The clever thing that Bell Labs did was to make Unix free for universities, whereas everyone else had to pay a fortune. So it was used in all of the computer science departments and so Bell Labs "infected" all of those CS majors with the Unix bug.

[Quoth]

But the Universities thought they had done most of the work and that Bell "stole" it. Which is why BSD and GNU were started.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But the Universities thought they had done most of the work and that Bell "stole" it. Which is why BSD and GNU were started.

I most certainly never heard that. And I worked at UC Berkeley where BSD came from.

BSD was a project to add virtual memory to Unix. At the time V7 Unix ran on the DEC PDP11 and VAX11. The VAX11 had the necessary stuff to do virtual memory but V7 Unix on it was the same as on the PDP11; no virtual memory. Bell Labs did eventually add virtual memory to V7 Unix but by then BSD was on all the VAX11s running Unix.

Gnu was Richard Stallman's free software thing. It came out several years after BSD came out. For the longest time there wasn't even an operating system, just all of the various programs, compilers, and whatnot.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But the Universities thought they had done most of the work and that Bell "stole" it. Which is why BSD and GNU were started.

Although Ken Thompson was a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley so it's possible he took some of their ideas with him, but I don't know if that was before Unix was created or after. (Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are the fathers of Unix.)

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by pazos

Unix was a son of its age. Computer operators were more skilled in the 70's. The concept of piping results from a program to another one was kind of revolutionary.

Nowadays that doesn't hold true and Unix-like systems are meant for end users. You can ask millions of Android/iOS/mac/chromebook users.

What happens to "Linux" as we know it is the lack of multi-zillion companies pushing money to its Desktop experience.

While Android etc are based on top of a Linux os, clearly they are no longer the same user experience.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

While Android etc are based on top of a Linux os, clearly they are no longer the same user experience.

Nevertheless, Android and the others are built on top of the Linux or UNIX kernels. Basically (except on the desktop) Linux has taken over the computing world. And now, with the surge of Chromebooks in recent years, Linux-based computers are even beginning to threaten the desktop/laptop market.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Nevertheless, Android and the others are built on top of the Linux or UNIX kernels. Basically (except on the desktop) Linux has taken over the computing world. And now, with the surge of Chromebooks in recent years, Linux-based computers are even beginning to threaten the desktop/laptop market.

Indeed. Once you include the Internet of Things (apparently guestimated at 8.4 billion things in 2017) and the myriad other "smart" devices that are not Internet connected - where so much is based on *nix derivations, and where people are often not even aware they are interacting with a computer - Windows might be considered almost inconsequential.

[Pajamaman]

I agree totally; however, this thread began talking about, and I continued to talk about Linux distros like Ubuntu for example you install on a desktop. Clearly Android and all the other derivutives etc are not the same thing. We are talking about desktop pc systems and pc Linux. You are changing the goal posts.

[gmw]

Actually the OP was quite explicit about wanting OCR on Ubuntu, I didn't interpret it as asking about comparing distros or availability of other applications or application choice. ALL of that has been quite off topic. The goal posts fell over quite some back.

Tesseract may not be perfect, but I would no longer classify it as "beggars can't be choosers". I use it under Windows because it does the job I need quite well, so why would I go hunting for a heavier and more expensive option? BUT, I am using the API for a specialist solution on English-only text and without any requirement to treat italics as italics and the various other details already discussed, so my experience is not necessarily that helpful to the OP.