Gazou OCR

Gazou is a Japanese and Chinese OCR application written in C++. It utilizes image processing, and other parameters to improve the accuracy. All contributions are welcome.

Installation

Windows

You can grab the latest portable zip build from the releases. Simply unzip and execute gazou.exe and the app should run.

Arch

Since this is packaged in the AUR, you can install it with any AUR helper like:

paru -S gazou-git

Building from source

Dependencies

These dependencies will need to be installed by your system's package manager:

• Qt5 >= 5.10
• Tesseract >= 4.0.0
• Leptonica >= 1.70

Optional dependencies:

• Qt5X11Extras >= 5.10 (for GUI)

Install

git clone --recursive https://github.com/kamui-fin/gazou.git
cd gazou
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DGUI=ON
sudo make install

Wayland

For wayland users, gazou must be compiled with -DGUI=OFF and use the equally functional command line interface. This is due to the fact that Wayland does not support applications registering their own global hotkeys as a security measure.

GUI

You can run the program by typing gazou in your terminal. It runs in the background and should appear in your system tray. If you click on the app in the tray, a settings dialog should appear. In here, you can customize the keybinds to your liking. The default hotkeys are:

• Alt+A: Vertical OCR
• Alt+D: Horizontal OCR
• Alt+S: Repeat the previous OCR

When you perform an OCR, the result text gets copied to the clipboard.

Just to clarify the language option names:

• jpn: Japanese
• chi_sim: Simplified Chinese
• chi_trad: Traditional Chinese

CLI

Gazou also has a command line mode, and this can be useful for integrating it with bash scripts. To get the resulting text copied to your clipboard, you can use xclip, wl-copy, or any clipboard utility you prefer. Available options include:

Usage: gazou [options] imagePath
Launches GUI if no options are provided.

Options:
  -p, --prevscan             Run the OCR on the same coordinates of the
                             previous scan
  -l, --language <language>  Specify OCR language, defaults to jpn. Options:
                             jpn, chi_sim, chi_trad
  -v, --vertical             Switch orientation to vertical. Without this,
                             gazou expects horizontal text.
  --version                  Fetch the version information of gazou
  --help                     View this help menu

Arguments:
  imagePath                  Source image file to OCR

Piping from stdin

You can also run gazou by pipeing an image into the CLI:

cat img.png | gazou