From kde-devel Tue Mar 06 13:16:34 2012 From: Klaas Freitag Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:16:34 +0000 To: kde-devel Subject: Re: GSoC idea: improving scanning and OCR in KDE (skanlite/kooka) Message-Id: <4F560E32.10608 () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=133103985625177 On 06.03.2012 14:00, Jos=E9 Manuel Santamar=EDa Lema wrote: Hey Jos=E9, > I'm considering to apply to GSoC this year, and if I do, I would like to > improve the status of scanning and optical character recognition in KDE; = being > more specific: > > > What I want to achieve > -------------------------------- > ... > So... to sum up: it was/is easier to produce good djvu documents with > propietary software. I want a KDE'ish program to replace the expensive > "Document Express". Thats a very ambitious target. > > > Some technical details > -------------------------------- > > Currently we have a couple of KDE programs to scan documents: skanlite and > kooka. skanlite is quite simple (doesn't do OCR stuff), uses the modern l= iksane > library, it's in extragear and works fine. kooka provided more functional= ity in > the KDE 3 old days than skanlite today (seems it was able to do some basi= c OCR > stuff), uses its obsolete libkscan library, it's in playground and I don'= t know > if it works or not because I don't have an scanning device right now, but= at > least it builds properly. There has been a KDE4 port of Kooka, as it was KDE3 originally. That = worked quite ok. > So... looks like the tasks to do to achive my goal would be: > 1. If needed, extend libksane functionality in order to make it a good > replacement for the old libkscan. I think thats already finished :-) > 2. Port kooka to the modern libksane. Cool, but I think Kooka as an app needs much more than just a new = underlying lib. Graphics apps nowadays are much more cool than Kooka = ever was. So if you pick that I think you should be willing to bring = Kooka to an up to date state. However I am not so sure if there is still = a demand for that kind of app... > 3. Add ocropus support to kooka (I heard with ocropus you can get the > coordinates of the texts, but I don't know for sure yet) > 4. Code something in kooka to produce djvu documents. The idea back in the days was to provide a component for OCR which can = be reused in all apps which deal with images, similar to what the = ScanService is (you can find it for example in Gwenview under the Moduls = menu. I think that would be really cool and could be a great GSOC = project imo. regards, Klaas >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscrib= e <<