[Pythonmac-SIG] Python OCR on the Mac?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Oct 20, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Paul Berkowitz wrote:

> On 10/20/05 5:08 PM, "Bill Janssen" <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Hi.  I'm looking for a way of doing OCR from Python on a Mac,
>> preferably without paying for anything in particular.
>>
>> In Windows, if you have Office installed, there's an included ActiveX
>> OCR component you can access nicely from Python to OCR page images.
>> I'm wondering if I can do something similar from Python on the Mac if
>> I have Office 2004 installed?  Or is there another package easily
>> accessible from Python that might already be there?
>>
>
> There's no ActiveX on the Mac, and no OCR in Office Mac.  
> (Apparently ActiveX
> is now open source, so presumably someone could port it. I don't  
> know that
> it would be welcomed. though...)

ActiveX is mostly just another word for COM which does exist on OS X  
to various extents (e.g. Finder plugins).  It's just a technology  
that allow different software to talk in-process or out; you can't  
"port" it because it doesn't mean anything on its own.

Office Mac may have an Apple Event API to do OCR stuff, if it does  
OCR at all.  Otherwise, I'd look for something open source.

-bob