Qipit Alternatives

jwink3101

I have been looking at the service Qipit.com and it looks like something really cool and something I would use. The problem is, I do not want to have to rely on an online service. Does anyone know of any or either of the following



1) Offline, open-source (mac compatible) program to do this.

2) How to get it just as good in photoshop

3) The algorithms used which I could implement (I know a little bit of C and can use MATLAB)



Thanks!

Marvin

They use OCR (optical character recognition) algorithms. There are a few offline programs that do this but they generally aren't free. There is an open-source one here:



http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/



which is based on Tesseract:



http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr/



I've used Omnipage X and ReadIris for OCR and they seem to be quite capable but they are expensive. You can get them on eBay and various other sites cheaper:



http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ReadIRIS-11-OC...ht_4962wt_1167



http://www.minskoldnew.com/index.php...c&progid=15525



ReadIris is $129 from the developer's site:



http://www.irislink.com/c2-1547-189/...rice-list.aspx



From my experiences with the commercial software, if you have complex documents, it can take a bit of tweaking to get the right output. Sometimes the layout just gets totally messed up if you try to convert the text into a word processor document because it's been done in a layout program like Indesign.