Text search without OCR

[marko001]

Hi all,

Just an easy question, but don't know if an easy answer is possible:

I need to read text from a simple image I take with

$hwnd = _ScreenCapture_Capture(@TempDir & "\" & $textimage,50,50,200,200)

Image can be "5-lines" long (so that I need to take 5 lines of text) or just 1 line (I just need to change coords in _screencapture())

I used different trial versions of OCR SDK but now, with them expired, costs is really high to get them for my and my family/friends use.

Since the text is always in Arial format (maybe can change the dimension or the font, nothing else), i'm asking if there is a (fast) way to take that text and put it in a $var.

When I say fast i mean not so time-consuming since waiting 30 secs for reading a word it's a no-sense.

I read a thread about _imagesearch() letter by letter but I believe from an informatic point of view is horrible.

Thanks to all the community,

Marco

[hannes08]

Hi Marco,

did you use the search function in the example scripts forum?

The first 4 results when searching for "OCR" sound pretty much like what you're looking for.

[Zedna]

As Hannes123 said here on the forum are tons of OCR stuff.

I like the one from Office for its simplicity.

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=50608

[marko001]

I already studied about that, due to my persistence in AutoIt forums i'm supposed to know about Search functions ^^

As infact that thread says: "Forgot to tell that Office 2003 is needed"

I know that 99.99% Office is installed but my aim is to do a completely stand-alone solution.

And Tesseract aswell, i "multi"tried it, including boring teaching sessions, but results are poor.

M.

[flet]

Google for Tesseract. It's open source OCR software.

When installed, you can OCR your screen capture like this:

ShellExecuteWait(@ProgramFilesDir & "\tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe", "inputimage.tif ocrresult")

As you can see, it requires tif image as input and output file will be a textfile in the scriptdir

Edited August 2, 2011 by flet

[blackmage999]

you might take a look at this thread