Creating vector graphics from web direct to print - printing

I would like to know what technologies are out there for generating high-resolution print-quality vector artwork from the web. And would like to know the pros and cons of each, please.
For example, a customer designs their own artwork for printing on some item using a combination of pre-defined images and free text. I want to output this in a 300dpi vector-based PDF that can be sent direct to a print production team who can then run it through the printer in whatever format without having to create the artwork.
Apologies if this has been asked, but I couldn't find an answer that clearly stated what technologies are there.
Many thanks
Ben

Related

What is the way to parse a string of a well known format from an image on iOS (some library created specifically for this purpose)?

Local travel cards in Saint-Petersburg, Russia have got huge id numbers that aren't easy to read and type into a web page when topping up the card online. So I want to build a small app that would take a photo of a travel card and parse the number out.
The task is a bit easier than a free form recognition:
card is of the very well known size
id numbers are of known size, are located in the very well known location on a card and they are number only, no letters (okay, there are two variations I think and maybe they will add 1-2 more in the future)
even the font is known in advance
even the first several numbers are the same for most of the card (so far there are only two prefixes used)
How would you do it? Are there any libraries tuned not for the general OCR, but for a "hinted" OCR like I need?
Best regards,
Artem.
P.S.
Actually a free/cheap web service for this task would also be good enough
Yes Google has a library called Tesseract and there is an iOS SDK on Github you can import into your application. So you can use this SDK and it has some documentation that you can read that will explain how to set it up in your app. It has methods that will return you a string with the text of the card in the string. BUT it will be ALL of the text from the card. So best thing to do would be to:
1 "clip" the original image to extract a sub image that displays only the portion of the card you wish to get the numbers from.
2 Process this sub image through Tesseract to retrieve the string you are looking for.
3 Then parse through the string and pick out the data that you need.
But just be warned, it can be a bit quirky. This SDK tends to recognize words best from images that are scanned, not "taken a picture of". Because although it is an advance piece of technology, it isn't perfect. So to get it to work as perfectly as possible for you, try to get scanned copies of the originals.
Best of luck.
The ideal solution for you would have three components:
1) Detection of the card. This is useful because if you have the detection, then the end users have much easier time actually using the scanner, because they can place the phone above the card in an arbitrary direction
2) Accurate OCR component. Ideally, customizable for this exact font you have on the card, for the exact position on the card.
3) Parsing mechanism. This would enable you to obtain the exact string written on the card without writing huge amount of OCR parsing code.
BlinkID SDK has all this. It has a preset for detection cards in the ID-1 format. It has integrated OCR engine. And it provides RegexParser, where you can define the exact format of the text which you're trying to extract from the document.
BlinkID was initially built for scanning ID documents which have very similar properties as the problem you're trying to solve.
Note. I'm one of the developers working on BlinkID.

Any Idea something application or system using CBIR (Content Based Image Retrieval)

i'm sorry, i need your help. i have problem to find unique tecnology (apps, system, or tool) in topic CBIR. do you have any idea unique apps that can be developed using CBIR? i blind and have nothing idea about CBIR. i mean, i have search idea about CBIR, but its too ordinary, and my teacher asked me to find more attractive idea about CBIR apps. search engine image, apps to identified tourism object, that my idea, any other idea from you?
NB : CBIR Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), also known as query by image content (QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases (see this survey[1] for a recent scientific overview of the CBIR field). Content-based image retrieval is opposed to traditional concept-based approaches (see Concept-based image indexing).
"Content-based" means that the search analyzes the contents of the image rather than the metadata such as keywords, tags, or descriptions associated with the image. The term "content" in this context might refer to colors, shapes, textures, or any other information that can be derived from the image itself.
for using ordinary methods
https://github.com/dermotte/LIRE you may use this library this is a demo site developed
lire Demo
But if you have enough time and enthusiasm you should look deep learning topics which is all state of art works on the field done on. Forexample you may look Karpathy's NueralTalk on github https://github.com/karpathy/neuraltalk2 and the wonderful demo page

EverNote OCR feature?

I downloaded the EverNote API Xcode Project but I have a question regarding the OCR feature. With their OCR service, can I take a picture and show the extracted text in a UILabel or does it not work like that?
Or is the text that is extracted not shown to me but only is for the search function of photos?
Has anyone ever had any experience with this or any ideas?
Thanks!
Yes, but it looks like it's going to be a bit of work.
When you get an EDAMResource that corresponds to an image, it has a property called recognition that returns an EDAMData object that contains the XML that defines the recognition info. For example, I attached this image to a note:
I inspected the recognition info that was attached to the corresponding EDAMResource object, and found this:
the xml i found on pastie.org, because it's too big to fit in an answer
As you can see, there's a LOT of information here. The XML is defined in the API documentation, so this would be where you parse the XML and extract the relevant information yourself. Fortunately, the structure of the XML is quite simple (you could write a parser in a few minutes). The hard part will be to figure out what parts you want to use.
It doesn't really work like that. Evernote doesn't really do "OCR" in the pure sense of turning document images into coherent paragraphs of text.
Evernote's recognition XML (which you can retrieve after via the technique that #DaveDeLong shows above) is most useful as an index to search against; the service will provide you sets of rectangles and sets of possible words/text fragments with probability scores attached. This makes a great basis for matching search terms, but a terrible one for constructing a single string that represents the document.
(I know this answer is like 4 years late, but Dave's excellent description doesn't really address this philosophical distinction that you'll run up against if you try to actually do what you were suggesting in the question.)

Using Ruby And Ubuntu With Optical Character Recognition

I am a university student and it's time to buy textbooks again. This quarter there are over 20 books I need for classes. Normally this wouldn't be such a big deal, as I would just copy and paste the ISBNs into Amazon. The ISBNs, however, are converted into an image on my school's book site. All I want to do is get the ISBNs into a string so I don't have to type each one by hand. I have used GOCR to convert the images into text, but I want to use it with a Ruby script so I can automate the process and do the same for my classmates.
I can navigate to the site. How can I save the image to a file on my computer (running UBUNTU), convert the image with GOCR, and finally save it to a file so I can then access them again with my Ruby script?
GOCR seems to be a good choice at first, but from what I can tell from my own "research", quality isn't quite sufficient for daily use. Maybe this could lead to a problem, depending on the image input. If it doesn't work out for you, try the "new" feature of Google Docs, which allows you to upload images for OCR. You can then retrieve the results using some google api ( there are tons out there, I'm using gdata-ruby-util which requires some hacking, though.
You could also use tesseract-ocr for the OCR part, it's also open source and in active development.
For the retrieval part, I would as well stick with hpricot, super-powerful and flexible.
Sounds like a cool project, and shouldn't be too hard if the ISBN images are stored in individual files.
This all can be run in the background:
download web page (net/http)
save metadata + image file for each book (paperclip)
run GOCR on all the images
All you need is a list of urls or a crawler (mechanize) and then you probably need to spend a few minutes writing a parser (see joe's post) for the university html pages.

List of diagram / image editors for Delphi

I need a good diagram / image editor for a Delphi application. I need the ability to place an image in the editor, and use freely positioned balloons / tips to describe parts of the image. The result must be exported as an image.
So far, I have evaluated KSDev Block Engine and TMS Diagram studio but am not completely satisfied with both of them. The former seems to have lots of little quirks and bugs and both of them don't seem to be able to export their content as an image (PNG with alpha channels is required).
Are there any other editors you know of that I might evaluate ?
There are two free components that I know of and have evaluated for a very limited period.
1) drawobjects by Angus Johnson # http://angusj.com/delphi/
2) simple graph from the delphiarrea site.
If I remember correctly both have the ability to export to an image format but I do not recall if they support png with alpha.
Regards
jo
PS sorry the anti spam does not allow me to post the link for the second pack and since I hate any kind of sign in just to answer a question my email and name are fake. This is the last time I am going to visit this site. I do understand the need to keep the spammers out but I can't accept any one to assume that I am a spammer. BB everyone.
Have also a look at:
- TeeTree from steema.com
- TCad from codeidea.com

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