On 12/15/2015 11:35 PM, Fred Smith wrote:

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 01:36:40PM +1030, Tim wrote:

Allegedly, on or about 15 December 2015, jd1008 sent:

Downloaded and tried tesseract and cuneiform, and both fail to
work on any of the pdf images I have. These images are NOT encrypted
as they are public documents like from the DMV, ... etc.

But are they good quality images?  OCR needs a reasonable resolution,
*and* clean character definition.

When I was using tesseract a few years ago (as mentioned earlier
in this thread) I was getting PDFs made of scanned legal documents
(from Groklaw, documents from the SCO v IBM case). These were pretty
awful quality, as if they had been scanned at some terribly low
resolution from what may have been poor quality originals (or copies
thereof). They were very messy to look at, but tesseract could read
most of it fairly well. but converting to higher-resolution TIFF 
files actually made the OCR work more poorly, odd as that may seem.

About 3 or so years ago, I tried tesseract and it was only about 80%
on good quality print. I tried the Windows program ABBYY and it
was virtually perfect. So if you have a long document, or a bunch
of documents, spend the money and find a Windows machine if
you don't have one. You'd be surprised how much work it is to
go thru and change "1"s to "l"s or vice versa, Or "i"s. And that's
just one example. And I can almost guarantee you'll miss a couple!
(If the document is not too long, it might be worthwhile to have
someone read it to you and type it in by hand!)

Looking at Google output, I find a free on-line service, but there might
be a problem sending a scanned file due to file size--check with your
usp. The url is: www.onlineocr.net

As they say on the net, YMMV!

--doug