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I use Flameshot combined with Tesseract and zbarimg to quickly clip areas of the screen and either OCR them or decode barcodes, which I then map to hotkey combi

by Gormo 2y ago

I use Flameshot combined with Tesseract and zbarimg to quickly clip areas of the screen and either OCR them or decode barcodes, which I then map to hotkey combinations. For example, I have `bash -c 'flameshot gui -s -r | tesseract - - | gxmessage -title "Decoded Data" -fn "Consolas 12" -wrap -geometry 640x480 -file -'` mapped to Super+O, so I can just press the key combo, select a region of the screen, and have the OCRed text immediately displayed in a dialog box from gxmessage (which accounts for most of the command line). Replace 'tesseract' with 'zbarimg' and you have a barcode scanner.

deleted 2y ago
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noisy_boy 2y ago
Great idea - I ended up experimenting to improve the ocr accuracy: #!/bin/bash screenshot=$(mktemp) decoded_data=$(mktemp) processed_data=$(mktemp) cleanup() { rm "$screenshot" "$decoded_data" "$processed_data" } trap cleanup EXIT flameshot gui -s -r > "$screenshot" convert "$screenshot" \ -colorspace Gray \ -scale 1191x2000 \ -unsharp 6.8x2.69+0 \ -resize 500% \ "$screenshot" tesseract \ --dpi 300 \ --oem 1 "$screenshot" - > "$decoded_data" grep -v '^\s*$' "$decoded_data" > "$processed_data" cat "$processed_data" | \ xclip -selection clipboard yad --text-info --title="Decoded Data" \ --width=940 \ --height=580 \ --wrap \ --fontname="Iosevka 14" \ --editable \ --filename="$processed_data"
- Gormo 2y ago
  Nice! Once you start getting complex, a standalone script might be a good idea. But it should be noted that your ImageMagick processing can also be inserted into the original one-liner: bash -c 'flameshot gui -s -r | convert - -colorspace Gray -scale 1191x2000 -unsharp 6.8x2.69+0 -resize 500% png:- | tesseract - - | gxmessage -title "Decoded Data" -fn "Consolas 12" -wrap -geometry 640x480 -file -'
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    Indeed; I just wanted to break it into sequential steps so that in case of issues, I can conveniently add debugging steps in the middle as needed.
- jasonni 2y ago
  Last year, when I want to find a tool to do the sanpshot and OCR job, I found flameshot. However, the OCR feature hasn't been added as native function due to some issues I'm not very clear. So I spent some time added the OCR function into flameshot. I didn't choose to compile tesseract into flameshot, but using the rest api way to call a server running remotely. The reason for this way is I also added llama.cpp translation feature after OCR. Here're github repositories for my fork of flameshot and the OCR and translation server which is written causually in Rust. https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot-ocr-server https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot-ocr-server
rahimnathwani 2y ago
If you've installed Flameshot using homebrew on MacOS, this will do a similar thing: /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/flameshot/12.1.0/flameshot.app/Contents/MacOS/flameshot gui -s -r | tesseract - - | (text=$(cat) && osascript -e "display dialog \"$text\" with title \"OCR Result\" buttons {\"OK\"} default button \"OK\"")

by Gormo 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

noisy_boy 2y ago

Great idea - I ended up experimenting to improve the ocr accuracy: #!/bin/bash screenshot=$(mktemp) decoded_data=$(mktemp) processed_data=$(mktemp) cleanup() { rm "$screenshot" "$decoded_data" "$processed_data" } trap cleanup EXIT flameshot gui -s -r > "$screenshot" convert "$screenshot" \ -colorspace Gray \ -scale 1191x2000 \ -unsharp 6.8x2.69+0 \ -resize 500% \ "$screenshot" tesseract \ --dpi 300 \ --oem 1 "$screenshot" - > "$decoded_data" grep -v '^\s*$' "$decoded_data" > "$processed_data" cat "$processed_data" | \ xclip -selection clipboard yad --text-info --title="Decoded Data" \ --width=940 \ --height=580 \ --wrap \ --fontname="Iosevka 14" \ --editable \ --filename="$processed_data"

Gormo 2y ago
Nice! Once you start getting complex, a standalone script might be a good idea. But it should be noted that your ImageMagick processing can also be inserted into the original one-liner: bash -c 'flameshot gui -s -r | convert - -colorspace Gray -scale 1191x2000 -unsharp 6.8x2.69+0 -resize 500% png:- | tesseract - - | gxmessage -title "Decoded Data" -fn "Consolas 12" -wrap -geometry 640x480 -file -'
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Indeed; I just wanted to break it into sequential steps so that in case of issues, I can conveniently add debugging steps in the middle as needed.
jasonni 2y ago
Last year, when I want to find a tool to do the sanpshot and OCR job, I found flameshot. However, the OCR feature hasn't been added as native function due to some issues I'm not very clear. So I spent some time added the OCR function into flameshot. I didn't choose to compile tesseract into flameshot, but using the rest api way to call a server running remotely. The reason for this way is I also added llama.cpp translation feature after OCR. Here're github repositories for my fork of flameshot and the OCR and translation server which is written causually in Rust. https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot-ocr-server https://github.com/jason-ni/flameshot-ocr-server

rahimnathwani 2y ago

If you've installed Flameshot using homebrew on MacOS, this will do a similar thing: /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/flameshot/12.1.0/flameshot.app/Contents/MacOS/flameshot gui -s -r | tesseract - - | (text=$(cat) && osascript -e "display dialog \"$text\" with title \"OCR Result\" buttons {\"OK\"} default button \"OK\"")