snapOCR

A tool for snapping a capture of a region of interest and extracting the text

TODO

Somehow fix pyinstaller broken setuptools on windows box.

Would only add:

poetry add --dev pyinstaller

Also needs fixes for PyQt5 in poetry

poetry add PyQt5

For now you need pyinstaller locally to generate releases:

pip install pyinstaller

Pyinstaller currently tested working on linux! Run pyinstaller against the spec file:

inside the project source snapOCR/snapOCR ''' pyinstaller main.spec '''

This will output the standalone binaries into a dist folder.

Then you can just use the environment normally afterwords:

poetry install

LINUX X11 based DE:

xhost +local:

Also install/ ensure xclip is on system or you will get:

Debian:

Error: Cannot find '.setClipboardContents' in object /klipper at org.kde.klipper

Solve with:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Install Tesseract OCR engine: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases

Ensure you are using the latest versions for good results! Don't rely on package manager. I build it from source included on tesseract instructions.

Workflow

Double click the icon, use the selector to outline your Region Of Interest, and then open up your favorite LLM. Add a short primer to the text that was extracted and added to your clipboard:

For example, for a multiple choice question you might type "help me answer: " then paste what is in your clipboard.

Lint

poetry run pylint --rcfile=.pylintrc snapOCR/

Build binary

from within snapOCR folder,

poetry run pyinstaller main.spec

Windows fix

Open the Run dialog:

Press Win + R.
Open Registry Editor:

Type regedit and hit Enter.
Navigate to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
Find or create LongPathsEnabled:

Look for a key named LongPathsEnabled.
If it exists, double-click it and set its value to 1.
If it doesn’t exist, right-click in the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, name it LongPathsEnabled, and set the value to 1.
Reboot your computer:

The changes will take effect after restarting the system.

Also,

afterwords run poetry install will result in a failure to install pyqt5. Install it manually:

poetry run pip install PyQt5

make sure you run the script with the environment python e.gg

poetry run python main.py

or within poetry shell

poetry shell
python main.py

Future

1. Change the QT application flow so "main" is responsible and modules just leverage off it.

2. Bundle tesseract with builds
3. linux distribution
4. add certs to exe generation for windows
5. Add modules for tesseract / OCR magik stuff
6. Automatic ROI extraction option
7. Template/ memory for specific functions/ forms that is useful over time (think dod standard forms etc.)
8. Selenium automation