| Developer: | Antonio Diaz Diaz |
| Operating System: | Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS |
| Genre: | Optical character recognition |
| License: | 2014: GPL-2.0-or-later 2007: GPL-3.0-or-later 2003: GPL-2.0-or-later |
Ocrad is an optical character recognition program and part of the GNU Project. It is free software licensed under the GNU GPL.
Based on a feature extraction method, it reads images in portable pixmap formats known as Portable anymap and produces text in byte (8-bit) or UTF-8 formats. Also included is a layout analyser, able to separate the columns or blocks of text normally found on printed pages.
Ocrad can be used as a stand-alone command-line application or as a back-end to other programs.
Kooka, which was the KDE environment's default scanning application until KDE 4, can use Ocrad as its OCR engine.[1] Since conversion to newer Qt versions, current versions of KDE no longer contain Kooka; development continues in the KDE git repository.[2] Ocrad can be also used as an OCR engine in OCRFeeder.[3]
Ocrad has been developed by Antonio Diaz Diaz since 2003. Version 0.7 was released in February 2004, 0.14 in February 2006 and 0.18 in May 2009. It is written in C++.
Archives of the bug-ocrad mailing list go back to October 2003.[4]