Best way to recognize characters in screenshot?

Question

What would you recommend for recognizing all characters from a screenshot? The screenshot is perfectly clear (only black text on a white background), also I can choose any s

Answer 1

I would be surprised if OCR would give so bad results on such a good quality input. Probably what you want to do is choose a font that has sharp edges, no anti-aliasing, bigger font size would also help.

Also, if acceptable, try the OCR font given in this SO question:

• What is the ideal font for OCR?

This should give you the best possible results - if this doesn't go 100%, then I don't know what will...

Don't know what you tried beside Tesseract, but if you did not, it might be worth trying some others. These seem to be updated recently (Tesseract was updated a year ago):

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocrad
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOCR
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus (this is also a bit old, but give it a try if you haven't)

There are some online versions, too, such as:

• http://www.cvisiontech.com/reference/ocr/top-ocr-software.html?lang=eng
• http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-online-ocr-services-intelligently-scan-documents/

that you can use to test a sample document. From this link:

• http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-ocr-software-tools-to-convert-your-images-into-text-nb/

it seems that you might need to go commercial to get what you want.

Hope this helps.