Rendering text question (context is MSWin UI Automation)

Boris Borcic bborcic at gmail.com
Tue Jan 23 09:59:46 EST 2007


Hello,

I am trying to use UI Automation to drive an MS Windows app (with pywinauto).

I need to scrape the app's window contents and use some form of OCR to get at 
the texts (pywinauto can't get at them).

As an alternative to integrating an OCR engine, and since I know the fonts and 
sizes used to write on the app's windows, I reasoned that I could base a simple 
text recognition module on the capability to drive MSWindows text rendering - eg 
to generate pixmaps of texts I expect to find in the driven app's windows, exact 
to the pixel.

The advantage of that approach would be exactitude and self-containment.

I've verified manually inside an Idle window, that indeed I could produce 
pixmaps of expected app texts, exact to the pixel (with Tkinter+screen capture 
at least).

I could use help to turn this into a programmable capability, ie : A simple - 
with Tkinter or otherwise - way to wrap access to the MS Windows UI text 
rendering engine, as a function that would return a picture of rendered text, 
given a string, a font, a size and colors ?

And ideally, without interfering with screen contents ?

Thanks in advance for any guidance,

Boris Borcic



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