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Engauge Digitizer

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KenR:
This program works backward from output to data, converting graphed data to individual data points that you can use in various data-based programs.

Engauge Digitizer is an open-source program designed to convert charts or maps provided as images into numeric data which can be exported as CSV and manipulated using Excel or other programs...
Manual digitization, as the name implies, involves going over a chart and manually placing enough points on it as to eventually have an adequate representation of it. In this scenario you need not worry so much about removing unwanted information from the image since you placing the points yourself anyway.
Automatic digitization is an option whereby the program will automatically hone in on a graph (or large segments of a graph), or you can outline a point on the graph and ask Engauge to hone in on all points that look like it. For the program to do these things correctly you need to eliminate all visual data that is not part of the graph or chart you are after. You can do this by using Engauge’s own filters, of which 2 (descretize and grid removal) are available. (You can also do a lot of cleaning up externally using an image editing program)...

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http://www.freewaregenius.com/2007/04/18/engauge-digitizer/

Nod5:
Slightly off topic, but I hope it's ok since this reminded me of something I've been curious about for some time. Is there some fairly simple program that (1) lets you create forms with checkboxes and perhaps also boxes for lettering and (2) can later scan a printed and filled copy of the form and export the data into various formats (or alternatively, do that OCR work on an image that some other scanning application creates)?

The ideal would be a program that lets me take an existing form, for example as a pdf document, load it into the application and create a "OCR template" out of it, by autorecognizing the place and size of its checkboxes and other fields and/or letting me manually set areas to OCR. But even a very basic version of such a program that only can be set to OCR a few checkboxes of one standard format might be useful for me.

Since automated OCR processing of forms seems to have been deployed by large companies for many years so maybe there are some end user applications capable of that today?

mouser:
there are such programs but i don't know of any good ones off hand; i would be interested in hearing about any though, since you can see how they would be useful to people conducting surveys, etc.

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