RichardH has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm looking for a free or inexpensive perl module (or something that can be called from Perl via win32::ole or some other win32 technique) which will take text encoded as an image and translate it into plain text. Anyone here have a suggestion?

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Re: Optical Character Recognition
by tachyon (Chancellor) on Aug 03, 2001 at 19:26 UTC

    This is not really the sort of task for which Perl is suited - it is a gigantic number crunching task where speed is of the essence, thus a compiled languague is likely to yelid best results. There does not appear to be anything on CPAN that does OCR searcing for OCR and Optical Character Recognition. A websearch for OCR on Google reveals a host of inexpensive OCR applications including engines (not so inexpensive) suitable for embedding in Perl via XS or OLE. Have a look here

    cheers

    tachyon

    s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

[reply]
      Thanks for the link! I was pretty sure CPAN wouldn't have anything suitable for this task.
[reply]
Re: Optical Character Recognition
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 03, 2001 at 19:11 UTC
    The obvious suggestion is to check out CPAN. Do a few searches there and see what turns up. If you find something, post it back here and let the rest of PM know. :)

    I do have a comment though - I've never heard of a Perl module being sold, for any amount of money. Perl is free (at least if you get it from CPAN ...)

    ------
    /me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

[reply]

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