[Bug-ocrad] Re: Request about adding more characters

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Donald. Thanks for your interest in Ocrad.

Donald Rogers wrote:
> I have recently started using ocrad for OCR of English texts. I am 
> impressed with it - partly because it handles UTF-8 text. IMHO any
> OCR program that does not handle Unicode characters is useless.

Well, my life would be a lot easier with an 8-bit charset, but people 
can't stop inventing letters. ;-)


> I would like to use ocrad for OCR of Esperanto texts. What is
> involved with adding the recognition of extra characters to ocrad?

A lot of work. I have hacked ocrad too much adding new characters. I 
have to rewrite some things to add support for a new charset (iso-8859-3 
in this case). (Offtopic note: Given that Zamenhof invented Esperanto, 
why did he choose accented letters instead of, say, the Latin alphabet?).


> I noticed in the ocrad source code that there are already some 
> characters with breves and some with circumflexes.

Yes, some from iso-8859-15 and some from iso-8859-9.


> I could also send a file or two of scanned Esperanto text in say PBM
> format, with the 12 letters:

Please, send them. I will try to add Esperanto support in version 0.12 
of ocrad.

Regards,
Antonio Diaz.