GOCR Windows Frontend

GOCR is an open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program that runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. It is a command line program that allows you to recognise characters from an image file. This frontend for GOCR is graphical and is designed to be simple to use, just select the graphics file that you want to recognise, and the output will be shown to you. You can then copy this output and paste it to somewhere useful. Most major graphical file formats are supported.

This frontend was done in VB.NET, so you will need the .NET runtimes installed in order to use it.

Installer

Source Code in VB.NET

Building GOCR on Windows (tested on Windows XP SP2)

Building GOCR from source isn't hard, and allows you to have the latest version. Below is a complete guide to building GOCR from source.

Download the DJGPP compiler from here: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
You will need the following components: DJGPP Basic Development Kit Basic assembler, linker Basic GCC compiler GNU debugger C++ compiler
If you go to http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/zip-picker.cgi then you can just pick the normal environment with the C++ compiler, and it will tell you what files that you need.
Follow the DJGPP installation instructions and make sure to set the DJGPP path and env variables. These instructions are on that site and are quite detailed.

Building GOCR Itself

First you must work out if you want to build from CVS or from a release version. To start with, building from a release version is probably easier, but the CVS version will have better performance and accuracy (usually). I will cover building from CVS further down. Download a GOCR release from http://jocr.sourceforge.net/download.html and extract the source. If you can't extract the source, you can get a freeware archive manager from http://www.7-zip.org/

Now you may need to edit the file make.bat. Find the line that looks like this: SET ROOT=D:\TMP2\CDROM\DOS\DJGPP and set the path to where DJGPP is installed on your system.

Once this is done, click on make.bat, and it should build a copy of gocr.exe in the same directory.
That's it, you're finished!

Building from source is similar, though obtaining the source is slightly different. If you don't have a CVS client already, you will need to download one from here: http://cvsgui.sourceforge.net/download.html. Once you've installed that, start WinCVS and go to Admin --> Commandline, and enter in: cvs -d:pserver: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :/cvsroot/jocr login cvs -z3 -d:pserver: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :/cvsroot/jocr co -P jocr This will download the CVS repository to your PC. You can then click on make.bat to make a version of gocr. Note, when I downloaded from CVS the make.bat file gave me an error. Please remember that CVS may not always build.