Any recommended OCR software for Linux?

[Pajamaman]

See how geeky it's got in here? The in-acronyms being thrown around is dizzying. I feel my hand twitching to give money to big bill. Which is not to say Linux is bad; Merely that it is geeky and also impenetrable to your average dumb user. Not a judgement, just a fact.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

See how geeky it's got in here? The in-acronyms being thrown around is dizzying. I feel my hand twitching to give money to big bill. Which is not to say Linux is bad; Merely that it is geeky and also impenetrable to your average dumb user. Not a judgement, just a fact.

That was true, but much less so today. A distro like Mint or Ubuntu would not intimidate many if any. If it were pre-insstalled, most Windows users would feel right at home very quickly, no need to grok grep at all

[leebase]

Originally Posted by simurq

Unfortunately, ABBYY ceased any support for Linux, with Fine Reader being Windows compatible only.

If you have a great solution for Windows...run Windows in a virtual machine with VirtualBox (or any other vm tool of your choice). I prefer Macs, but there are apps I need to occasionally run that are only on Windows. I run them in a vm.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

That was true, but much less so today. A distro like Mint or Ubuntu would not intimidate many if any. If it were pre-insstalled, most Windows users would feel right at home very quickly, no need to grok grep at all

I agree it's gotten more accessible.

[Pajamaman]

And then there is driver and peripheral support When I installed a distro recently, my paramount criterion was this.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

And then there is driver and peripheral support When I installed a distro recently, my paramount criterion was this.

Just to keep an eye on things I subscribe to the debian sub on reddit. Probably at least every 2 days there's a plea for help from some hapless newbie because either their video or network isn't working after they did an install. For some reason the debian installation instructions aren't as helpful as they could be about new installs probably needing the image with the "non-free" drivers.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Less.

There was a time when the excitement was that workstations with a 1 MHz CPU, 1 MB RAM, and 1 megapixel display would be common soon. Since then memory and CPU speed grew faster than pixel number.

Yeah you're right. It was a quarter meg of ram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

A distro like Mint or Ubuntu would not intimidate many if any.

That's the worst possible choice, as Debian doesn't have any administrative tools and their package format is the worst.
Plus, there is an inherent inability to create a working GUI for the Linux software due to the lack of working IPC.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by roger64

Hi

Tesseract, gimageReader, LO.

All images are in the attached zip file.

Thanks for posting these.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

... FWIW this entire post is courtesy of Dragon.

If you need specialty software, by all means go with the OS that supports that software. I personally can't find anything better than Linux for what I do as a general computer user.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Commercial software is developed for (and by) people involved in the processes the software is intended to assist with. Free software is made by people who like cr*p like vi or TeX, and who do not understand how the proper software should work, and why.

In other words, not the way you, personally, think it should work. You would probably hate Jstar — but I love it. Almost all my writing starts as plain text and that works for me. For me, Windows is bloated crap, subject to Registry file corruption, BSODs and viruses and ransomware. The way it updates is a pain. I always hated Office and I don't have a need for specialized, Windows-only applications. I've been using Linux (mostly Linux Mint) exclusively for about fifteen years — unfortunately I still have to support my family's Windows computers, so I'm constantly reminded of why I didn't (and don't) like Windows. I would never go back.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by rcentros

If you need specialty software, by all means go with the OS that supports that software. I personally can't find anything better than Linux for what I do as a general computer user.

Exactly. As my other posts show, I am not anti-Linux at all. I loved the fun I had with Linux, my first distro being Mandrake 6 iirc, and am currently engaged in a hobby project to get the most out of Linux on a VM in my current Windows setup. In the end, any software, OS or otherwise, is simply a tool to get a job done. When one tool doesn't work, find another.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by John F

I use quite a bit of free software, and I would say it works as proper software should. I'm a user of the software, not a developer.

Same here. I like plain text for writing, it's not liable to corruption or becoming obsolete.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

I think a problem Linux has is the lack of dumb-user friendliness. For example, the process of installing software seems to me to be is considerably less intuitive than Windows. Windows is double-click and it's done. Linux, not so much. I guess there are simple ways to do it? But I resorted to the command line which will leave the average user glazing over and reaching for money to pay Gates.

Most Linux software is in the repository that's included with your distribution. In Linux Mint I open the Package Manager, do a search for the the application I want, chose it and install it. Done. In Windows I would have to search for the software, download it (hopefully from a site not infested with malware) and then install (and hopefully the version of the DLLs that application needs doesn't conflict with the version of DLLs needed by another application I already have installed). And heaven forbid, my hard drive goes out and I have to track down the license I haven't used for five years.

If I download the commercial software (like Fade In for Linux) it's a matter of clicking on the download, giving it permission and watching it install. The package manager knows how to automatically discover any dependencies needed and automatically downloads them — and, if that package needs a different support library than another package already installed, Linux can use both. It's only complicated if you haven't learned how it easily it works. (And, yes, there is a learning curve with Linux — there was a learning curve when you first learned Windows as well.)

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

The CLI was my friend back when I lived in Linux, and I loved what it empowered me to do. The versatility of keyboard-based gems like GNU Emacs, and even wannabes like vi(m) was and is great. Until one's hands decide that they'd rather not pay full attention to what one's brain asks them to do. When choosing distros to try in VMs, I skipped Arch after reading that its installation was very cli-dependent. Typos in an installation process definitely suboptimal. That's an example of the sort of accesiibility problem Linux has.

To me, the CLI (and shell scripts) are one of the main draws of Linux. It's faster and more efficient than the GUI. And I like not having to use the mouse.

But my father has been using Linux Mint for about nine years now and he almost NEVER uses the CLI. So maybe your issue was with your choice of distributions, not Linux in general. Arch is known as a very "hands-on" distribution. There are many other Linux distributions that aren't Arch. Manjaro is an Arch derivative — "Arch made for simple" (for example). Lots of choice in Linux. I use Linux Mint because it's simple to use and the Ubuntu (and Debian) repositories are huge.