OCR support of german language - information needed

Aspose.OCR Product Family
1

Hello,

We bought a “Aspose.Total for .NET” license. The OCR features were a major factor for our decision. We have mostly customers with German context.

At the time we investigated Aspose, the support for the German language was announced for last year. The planned OCR features needs to be implemented in an important project soon.

Unfortunately we realize, the support for German was now postponed.

I found this forum posts regarding this subject:

In these posts you are talking about a “Ticket OCR-31611”. I have no clue where a can find that ticket.

To be honest after reading these posts I am shocked about the process how feature requests are dealt with. This is how I observe this subject:

There is this multiple times requested feature. After years! it was accepted as feature.

A release date for the feature was announced. Customers ask what happened. but only afterwards you announce it is delayed.

Month after the last announced release date customers ask what happened - but again only afterwards you announce it is postponed. But you announce no new timeline.

I am also surprised about the timespan for a language support that is “English plus 4 additional characters”. English is supported already. I don’t know the internals - but that sounds like a quick win for me.

Me and every other decision makers need planning reliability. I need information to decide if the Aspose library is still the way to go for us.

With that being said, I need useful clarifications of the following topics for me:

  • how can I see the referenced ticket OCR-31611. A link would be helpful.
  • is there a more transparent way for this feature-roadmaps and decisions in general than searching the forums? I could not find a roadmap on your site. Again: a link would be helpful.
  • is the OCR support for the German language not developed any more right now?
  • if the feature is still in development: A realistic worst case release date would be helpful.

Kind regards,
Tobias

2

Hi,


Thank you for this information. We will investigate and get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks,
3

Hi Tobias,

You are right, OCR-31611 is one of the oldest feature requests logged for Aspose.OCR. Our product team had made a significant progress on this feature a few years back but then they stopped working on the issue because of the following reasons.

  • Initial releases of Aspose.OCR were using old mechanism to recognize text and were not meeting customers' expectations most of the time. We had to stop progress on this feature and restructure Aspose.OCR first to meet customers' expectations.
  • Restructured version with small installer size, more speed and better accuracy rate was released last year.
  • After restructuring, our first priority was to improve speed and accuracy for existing languages. Although speed and accuracy has been improved a lot but there are still some issues when it comes to low quality or blurred images. Our product team is continuously working on improving the OCR process for existing languages; new languages will be added after that.

New languages will have low priority until we reach a higher level of accuracy to meet customers' requirements. Normally, new features do not take this much of time but OCR is a complex process and restructuring of Aspose.OCR took considerable time.

At the moment we are not in a position to give any timeframe for German as it will not be supported in the near future. We will let you know as soon as this feature is added to our roadmap.

We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

Best Regards,

4

Hi

Is German still not available and in planning for ocr? We need to recognize ö, ä, ü, …

Thanks.

5

@marchuber,

Support for German language is not yet available. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused.

6

Hi

Is German still not available and in planning for ocr? We need to recognize ö, ä, ü, …

Thanks.

7

@marchuber

We regret to share that German language support is not yet available. However, we will surely let you know as soon as we plan to provide it or it is available.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.