Scanner for optical character recognition of Thai

[JohnIrish]

Hi..

I am in the market for a scanner that has optical character recognition of Thai letters. I want to be able to scan a document and copy the Thai words and sentences into a flashcard program to study the Thai language.

Do all new Scanners have OCR software to support Thai? (HP, Brother, Cannon, etc).

I have also thought of buying a new Printer/Scanner instead of just a scanner. A cheap Cannon Scanner is about $60 so I could get a printer/Scanner for $120. Would you recommend seperate printer & scanner or a multi-functional unit?

Also... I am running Linux if that makes a difference. I also could run Windows 7 under a virtual machine if necessary.

Any recommendations on what to purchase would be greatly appreciated!

thanks

JohnIrish

[dave_boo]

I am still of the camp that separate devices for separate functions is best. When the printer is no longer useful or you upgrade to a nicer one than you haven't paid for a door stop.

Also HP has really useful tool kit under Linux and it seems to have more hardware supported.

Only OCR I've used has been gImageReader. It's a front end for Tesseract which is a really good OCR programme. OCRFeeder also seems good and a bit more feature rich.

If you are to go with gImageReader you will need Sane installed and utilise the pdf output. Looks like OCRFeeder, which also uses Sane, can cut out the step where you have to manually save the scans.

[newcomer01]

Space is the issue. How much are you going to use it.

All in one is convenient. I have a Brother scanner printer with refillable ink attachments at the front . works great. Didn't have much luck with Epsom. New model has WiFi. About 4500 baht I think.

OCR is software will work on most images.

Edited June 18, 2014 by newcomer01

[eish]

Space is the issue. How much are you going to use it.

All in one is convenient. I have a Brother scanner printer with refillable ink attachments at the front . works great. Didn't have much luck with Epsom. New model has WiFi. About 4500 baht I think.

OCR is software will work on most images.

yes get some images and test the software before you jump. looked at this long back and wasnt suited. now, dont know.