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Month: August 2018 (Page 1 of 3)

OCRing images in Windows

August 29, 2018 /

I recently visited a facility that displayed framed “wall art” of funny quotes from famous people. I found the quotes amusing, so I took pictures of all the wall hangings. The problem is, I don’t want to spend the time typing up all those quotes by hand (of course, I’ve probably spent much more time programming an alternative).  Anyway, OCR to the rescue!

Windows seems to have a variety of options for OCR, but these all seem largely GUI driven.  I’d rather have a command line solution.  Enter Tesseract-OCR.

Tesseract is a command line tool used for parsing text from image files.  Like most cool tools of its ilk, it works best in Linux.  Am I sunk, then, as my main environment is Windows?  Nope.  I can install tesseract in my Linux sub-system and access it from Windows.  Here’s how I solved this problem:

Step 1: Use wsl.exe to run tesseract

I actually ran all my work from a Jupyter Notebook using its shell command feature.



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image_file = '/mnt/c/myfilepath/nb-miscellany/IMG_20180801_150228139.jpg'

! wsl tesseract {image_file} {image_file}

Step 2: Open the results

Tesseract seems to automatically append a “.txt” to the end of the outfile you supply it.  Since I supplied it my image filepath, it created a new file, IMG_20180801_150228139.jpg.txt, containing the text it parsed.  I can just run “cat” to see the results:



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out_file = image_file + '.txt'



! wsl cat {out_file}

And here are my results:

Everyone needs to believe in something. I believe I'll
have another drink.

W.C. Fields

The only reason people get lost in thought is because
it's unfamiliar territory.

Unknown

I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that
too much to ask of a millionaire?
Zsa Zsa Gabor

By the time a man is wise enough To watch his step,
he's too old to go anywhere.
Billy Crystal

There are two Types of people in +his world, good and
bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem To
enjoy the waking hours much more.

Woody Allen

r never forget o face, but in your case I'll be glad to
make an exception.
Groucho Marx

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat
slowly and lie about your age.
Lucille Ball

Not too shabby!

Run Linux apps in Windows

August 26, 2018 /

Windows 10 now includes the ability to run a Linux shell within it.  That alone is pretty awesome.  What’s even awesome…er…is that you can easily access that sub-system from Windows with the wsl.exe utility.  Try this out:

Step 1: Launch your Linux subsystem

On my Windows laptop, I installed an instance of Ubuntu.  From my home directory, I simply list the directory contents:



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brad@brad-laptop:~$ ll

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 1 brad brad 4096 Aug 26 13:57 ./

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Aug 25 21:08 ../

-rw-r--r-- 1 brad brad  220 Aug 25 21:08 .bash_logout

-rw-r--r-- 1 brad brad 3771 Aug 25 21:08 .bashrc

-rw-r--r-- 1 brad brad  807 Aug 25 21:08 .profile

-rw-r--r-- 1 brad brad    0 Aug 25 21:11 .sudo_as_admin_successful

-rw-rw-rw- 1 brad brad    0 Aug 26 11:04 test.txt

Step 2: Open up the Windows command shell

Now, open up a Windows command shell.  Using wsl.exe, list the contents of your home directory.  Interestingly, while my Ubuntu instance knows the “ll” alias, wsl does not.  Nevertheless, I can run the ls -l command and see the contents of my home directory.

What if you have multiple Linux sub-systems installed?

Initially, I installed multiple Linux sub-systems on my Windows machine, but could find no way to get wsl to target a specific system.  There may well be an option: I just haven’t been able to find it yet.  Regardless, this advent from Microsoft now opens up so many more options, as there are a variety of wonderful tools in Linux that either can’t be installed in Windows or can’t easily be installed.  Now, you don’t have to: just install those tools in your Linux sub-system and run them there or from Windows via wsl.exe.

Creating venn diagrams

August 21, 2018 /

Who doesn’t have a need, from time to time, to create a nice Venn Diagram?

Recently, my kid had a need to create a diagram of the three branches of the US federal government with examples of their intersections.  Here’s what I came up with to help her out:

Step 1: Install the excellent matplotlib extension, matplotlib-venn

Thanks to examples on the Python Graph Gallery and doing a little bit of searching around, using matplotlib-venn wasn’t all that difficult.

Step 2: Load up the necessary packages



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import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from matplotlib_venn import venn3

import matplotlib.patheffects as path_effects

Step 3: Build your diagram

Here’s the code I came up with:



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fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10))

v = venn3(subsets = (10, 10, 4, 10, 4, 4, 2), set_labels = ('', '', ''), ax=ax)

v.get_label_by_id('100').set_text('Executive')

v.get_label_by_id('010').set_text('Legislative')

v.get_label_by_id('001').set_text('Judicial')

v.get_label_by_id('110').set_text('Example 1')

v.get_label_by_id('011').set_text('Example 2')

v.get_label_by_id('101').set_text('Example 3')

v.get_label_by_id('111').set_text('')

plt.title("The Three Branches of the US Government")



example_text = ('Example 1: The Vice President is considered "President of the Senate" and can vote to break ties.\n'

                'Example 2: The Legislature confirms Supreme Court justices.\n'

                'Example 3: The Executive appoints potential Supreme Court justices.')



text = fig.text(0.0, 0.05, example_text, ha='left', va='bottom', size=14)

text.set_path_effects([path_effects.Normal()])



plt.show()

And the final result:

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