Plans for tesseract 5.x.y

[amitdo]

I suggest to focus on 5.x for 2022 at least.

That means we should not break the API (and ABI?). Use C++17, not C++20/C++23.

[stweil]

What about releasing a 5.0.1 after Christmas at the end of December? I think there are several fixes since 5.0.0 which would be good for a new release.

[amitdo]

Mind reader :-)
I was about to suggest to release 5.0.1 before year end. It would be nice if we can fix #3683 before releasing 5.0.1.

[amitdo]

Right before tagging 5.0.1, you can update this sentence from the README:

The latest stable version is 5.0.0, released on November 30, 2021.

[egorpugin]

What should be added into v5?
5.x changes could be merged into branch and cherry picked into v6 main.

[stweil]

We already have a wish list for improved training, a lot of issues with layout detection, want improved logging, and much more. Maintaining two branches did not work good with 4.x, and I am afraid it would not work better with 5.x.

[egorpugin]

Maybe keep 5.0 as is? It is a good release with a number of changes.
Everything else will go straight into 6?

[amitdo]

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdoc/blob/main/ReleaseNotes.md#changes-made-since-last-release

[amitdo]

What about releasing a 5.0.1 after Christmas at the end of December? I think there are several fixes since 5.0.0 which would be good for a new release.

Do you plan to release 5.0.1 next week?

[stweil]

Yes, unless we discover that something very important is still missing.

[stweil]

It would be nice if we can fix #3683 before releasing 5.0.1.

There is still no fix, and I have no clang-cl, so I cannot look for a fix myself. Should we release 5.0.1 without a fix? Are other things missing for 5.0.1 (besides updating of the documentation)?

[egorpugin]

clang-cl is not worth it currently.

[amitdo]

You can release 5.0.1 without the clang-cl fix.

[stweil]

Release 5.0.1 is now online.

[stweil]

The next release could be a new minor version 5.1.0 with new features, maybe end of January (unless there is an urgent need for a bug fix release 5.0.2). I want to have especially image information in ALTO and hOCR output (see PR #3710 which implements that for hOCR), maybe more from the project list. The new minor release would also disable OpenMP by default for autoconf builds, too.

[amitdo]

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=tesseract-ocr

@AlexanderP,

Are you going to update Ubuntu 22.04 to 5.0.1 soon? The feature freeze date is February 24.

[AlexanderP]

@amitdo

i uploaded:

• tesseract-ocr 4.1.3 and 5.0.1 https://mentors.debian.net/package/tesseract
• tesseract-lang 1:5.0.0~git39-6572757-1 https://mentors.debian.net/package/tesseract-lang/

I hope @jbreiden will upload them to debian.

[amitdo]

Hi @AlexanderP,

I hope @jbreiden will upload them to debian.

From https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/tesseract :

maintainer: [Alexander Pozdnyakov]

So, why can't you directly push new versions of Tesseract to Debian?

[stweil]

I'd like to create a new release Tesseract 5.1.0 soon. Originally I had planned it for end of January.

Are there any contributions or important bug fixes which should be included still pending (then I'd wait), or can we release now?

[Shreeshrii]

I suggest you go ahead with 5.1.0 now.

I would like to see improvements related to training and evaluation implemented, but they could go in a future release.

[stweil]

Release 5.1.0 is now available.

[AlexanderP]

@amitdo no rights to upload to debian

[stweil]

There are now several fixes and improvements in git master, so I think it's time for a new release 5.1.1.

@egorpugin, is it possible to fix the CI sw build which is currently failing?

Are there any other contributions or important bug fixes which should be included still pending (then I'd wait), or can we release now? Ideally #3782 should also be included.

[egorpugin]

Yes, I'll check.

[zdenop]

Unfortunately windows build does not work (for me): I tried Clang (14) and MS Visual Studio (2019). Here are logs:
clang_build.zip
msvc_build.zip

[amitdo]

cmake-win64 action fails (since March 29).

cmake and vcpkg actions pass.

[egorpugin]

I fixed sw build in ci.
Zdenko, is it fails only on VS2019? Can you check VS2022.

[zdenop]

cmake-win64 action has some strange error: it fails already on unzipping zlib (or maybe even earlier: during setting up shell?)

And vcpkg is IMO not building the HEAD, but 5.1.0:

And I see this with HEAD:

[amitdo]

I can do that on Monday or Tuesday, for example

Which Monday/Tuesday? :-)

[stweil]

That's a good question. Thanks for the reminder.

Release 5.3.2 is now available. Thank you for all contributions and your support.

If someone misses names of contributors in the release notes: that information is auto-generated by GitHub. I have no idea why GitHub ignores some commits there. Maybe it only considers contributions with related pull requests?

[nijel]

Any plans for a new release? I'd like to see d7c0711 being released for sirfz/tesserocr#330.

[stweil]

Commit 063ad31 is even more important. So yes, there are good reasons for a new release, and I'll prepare it as soon as possible.

[stweil]

ChangeLog for the planned new release 5.3.3:

• Small code fixes and improvements to fix Coverity Scan issues.
• Disable -mfpu=neon for aarch64.
• Fix build without git clone in cloned directory (required for FreeBSD).
• Other build fixes for autotools, cmake and sw.
• Fix regression in layout detection which was introduced in release 5.0.0.
• Fix regression which prevented loading of submodels, introduced in release 5.0.0-rc2.
• Other small improvements for code and documentation.

Please comment if something should be changed or is missing.

[amitdo]

Can you look at issue #4002 and try to resolve it?

If you don't think you'll be able to fix it in a short time, you can still release 5.3.3 without a fix for that issue.

[stweil]

Thank you for that hint. That was another regression (since 5.0.0-rc2) which is fixed in pull request #4141.

[stweil]

Is there anything else missing for 5.3.3? If not, I'd tag it after PR #4141 was reviewed and merged.

[stweil]

Release 5.3.3 is now available. New binaries for Windows are available, too.

As always thank you for all contributions (especially from several new contributors) and your support.

[stweil]

Should we publish a 5.3.4 this weekend? List of important changes:

• Fixes for scrollview
• Fixes for autoconf, clang and sw builds
• Fail on curl download errors
• New parameter curl_cookiefile
• Output directory list from "combine_tessdata -d" to stdout

Is there anything missing?

[amitdo]

+1 for releasing 5.3.4.

[egorpugin]

+1

[stweil]

Should we publish a 5.3.4 this weekend?

Done, see https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases/tag/5.3.4.

Thank you to all who contributed to the release with commits, pull requests, issue reports and in any other way.

[amitdo]

@AlexanderP,

I hope you can push Tesseract 5.3.4 to Debian unstable so it will find its way to Ubuntu 24.04.

[stweil]

List of important changes since 5.3.4:

• Fix grey result of indexed PNG in pdfrenderer
• [pdfrenderer] Do not include space symbol into the word pdf box
• [pdfrenderer] Add some debugging capabilities
• normstrngs: add more hyphens and quotes
• Updates for documentation, build and test scripts

Did I miss something?

As soon as the renaming of frk -> deu_latf (see tesseract-ocr/langdata_lstm#59) is finished, I can publish a new release 5.3.5.

[stweil]

Maybe we can also fix some more of the 138 issues which are reported by Coverity scan.

[amitdo]

[pdfrenderer] Do not include space symbol into the word pdf box

What about macOS Preview?
#3139 (comment)

[egorpugin]

Do not test it with macOS Preview. Test with chrome on macos.
I've checked it after fixing one-off patch.
Chrome displays the document in same manner as on win.

Different programs render pdf differently and we do not know if they are correct.
So focus only on the most used render (chrome) for now.

[amitdo]

First, this reminds me the days when large percent of websites told you: "This site is best viewed by Internet Explorer".

I think the most used pdf viewer on macOS is Preview. Mac users prefer to use Apple's tools. Same for Chrome vs. Safari.

Also, this patch make Evince selection behave worse than how it behave before.

There is also a suggested alternative patch that might work better across different renderer.

[egorpugin]

We have four cases:

1. tess fails, viewer fails
2. tess fails, viewer ok
3. tess ok, viewer fails
4. tess ok, viewer ok

Is chrome viewer ok?
Is macos preview ok?
Is evince ok?
Is adobe viewer ok?

Different viewer behavior means that someone is correct and others are not.
Which one is the correct viewer?

[amitdo]

Let's cpntinue the discusion about the pdf renderer in issue #2879.

[amitdo]

OK. I decided to remove my objection to the recent changes in the pdf renderer.

[amitdo]

@stweil,

What about the useless OpenCL code? It's about time we removed it.

[stweil]

@jbarlow83, are the latest changes in Tesseract's PDF renderer compatible with OCRmyPDF, or would they break it?

[jbarlow83]

@stweil The changes in the PDF renderer are compatible with OCRmyPDF and yield a slight improvement in text positioning on Evince. LGTM.

I tested Tesseract commit 2b07505 which includes egorpugin's changes by examining visual results in Evince using both OCRmyPDF's wrapper around the Tesseract PDF renderer (--pdf-renderer sandwich) and the direct output from PDF renderer. Did not check macOS Preview where the trouble usually is. I also confirmed that the PDF produced by debugging changes commit (which could have an impact on production output) is still producing a syntactically valid PDF when debugging is off.

[amitdo]

The next release will be 5.4.0.

[amitdo]

amitdo commented Mar 18, 2024 •

@stweil,

What about the useless OpenCL code? It's about time we removed it.

Done in #4220.

[amitdo]

@stweil,

Can you please release 5.4.0 in the next few days?

[stweil]

That's my plan.