hOCR is a format for representing OCR output, including layout information, character confidences, bounding boxes, and style information. It embeds this information invisibly in standard HTML. By building on standard HTML, it automatically inherits well-defined support for most scripts, languages, and common layout options. Furthermore, unlike previous OCR formats, the recognized text and OCR-related information co-exist in the same file and survives editing and manipulation. hOCR markup is independent of the presentation.
There is a Public Specification for the hOCR Format.
This repository contains my own fork of the package with quite some changes:
- Allow library usage and reduce code duplicates by this.
- Migrate tests to plain unittest-based ones instead of some external framework.
- Remove some deprecated code to make it compatible with latest Python 3 versions.
- Add type hints.
For now, I do not have any direct plans to send a corresponding PR. Unfortunately, as for quite some similar OCR-related tools, development is rather inactive (at least inside the official GitHub repositories). Some deprecations have been discussed for a long time, as well as the library support (which I primarily need), with no real progress.
You can install hocr-tools along with its dependencies from PyPI:
pip install hocr-tools-libOr from the Git checkout:
pip install .
Included command line programs:
hocr-check file.html
Perform consistency checks on the hOCR file.
hocr-combine file1.html [file2.html ...]
Combine the OCR pages contained in each HTML file into a single document. The document metadata is taken from the first file.
hocr-cut [-h] [-d] [file.html]
Cut a page (horizontally) into two pages in the middle such that the most of the bounding boxes are separated nicely, e.g. cutting double pages or double columns
hocr-eval-lines [-v] true-lines.txt hocr-actual.html
Evaluate hOCR output against ASCII ground truth. This evaluation method requires that the line breaks in true-lines.txt and the ocr_line elements in hocr-actual.html agree (most ASCII output from OCR systems satisfies this requirement).
hocr-eval-geom [-e element-name] [-o overlap-threshold] hocr-truth hocr-actual
Compare the segmentations at the level of the element name (default: ocr_line). Computes undersegmentation, oversegmentation, and missegmentation.
hocr-eval hocr-true.html hocr-actual.html
Evaluate the actual OCR with respect to the ground truth. This outputs the number of OCR errors due to incorrect segmentation and the number of OCR errors due to character recognition errors.
It works by aligning segmentation components geometrically, and for each segmentation component that can be aligned, computing the string edit distance of the text the segmentation component contains.
Extract lines from Google 1000 book sample
hocr-extract-images [-b BASENAME] [-p PATTERN] [-e ELEMENT] [-P PADDING] [file]
Extract the images and texts within all the ocr_line elements within the hOCR file.
The BASENAME is the image directory, the default pattern is line-%03d.png,
the default element is ocr_line and there is no extra padding by default.
hocr-lines [FILE]
Extract the text within all the ocr_line elements within the hOCR file
given by FILE. If called without any file, hocr-lines reads
hOCR data from stdin.
hocr-merge-dc dc.xml hocr.html > hocr-new.html
Merges the Dublin Core metadata into the hOCR file by encoding the data in its header.
hocr-pdf <imgdir> > out.pdf
hocr-pdf --savefile out.pdf <imgdir>
Create a searchable PDF from a pile of hOCR and JPEG. It is important that the corresponding JPEG and hOCR files have the same name with their respective file ending. All of these files should lie in one directory, which one has to specify as an argument when calling the command, e.g. use hocr-pdf . > out.pdf to run the command in the current directory and save the output as out.pdf alternatively hocr-pdf . --savefile out.pdf which avoids routing the output through the terminal.
hocr-split file.html pattern
Split a multipage hOCR file into hOCR files containing one page each. The pattern should something like "base-%03d.html"
hocr-wordfreq [-h] [-i] [-n MAX] [-s] [-y] [file.html]
Outputs a list of the most frequent words in an hOCR file with their number of occurrences.
If called without any file, hocr-wordfreq reads hOCR data (for example from hocr-combine) from stdin.
By default, the first 10 words are shown, but any number can be requested with -n.
Use -i to ignore upper and lower case, -s to split on spaces only which will then
lead to words also containing punctations, and -y tries to dehyphenate the text
(separation of words at line break with a hyphen) before analysis.