Hello,
I refer to the not yet implemented method mouse_click_ocr mentioned in this thread.
Is it possible to make OCR without thridparty applications? We do practice OCR in our bots, but we had to use a pre-installed application for that, for we did not find anything better.
So I wonder, if mouse_click_ocr could work without external applications or if there is some python magic I haven’t discovered, yet?
Regards,
Markus
Hi,
There are some libraries providing OCR functionality, such as https://pypi.org/project/robotframework-imagelibrary/. Typically they use TesseractOCR under the hood. I’m afraid these libraries need extra work to be usable for desktop navigation (e.g. for mouse navigation).
We have talked about adding something similar to RPA Framework.
Mouse_click_ocr is just a placeholder for now.
Currently RPA Framework provides way to use cloud based OCR engines, but again not very useful for desktop navigation.
If template image matching is enough RPA.Desktop.Windows provides basic capabilities such as Mouse Click Image.
Regards,
Mika / Robocorp
Hi,
thank you! Good to know.
We do use tesseract, too. It is wrapped in a docker container and runs as a service in our closed cloud. The service even comes with some enhancements (correction of angles, playing with contrasts). It is used by several applications - and by our robots. We implemented specific keywords for that service similar to the robotframework-imagelibrary.
I think, ocr as cloud service is ok for desktop navigation, too. At least as a start, maybe for more. Tesseract is quite powerful (and huge). Installing it by default would probably have an impact on the host machine.
Regards,
Markus
Hi Mika, Could you advise in library documentation which keywords are just placeholders ? Is there any markup ?
Hi,
I agree it is a bit unclear how placeholder / missing keywords are documented. We’ll improve that.
But in general there shouldn’t be many of those, I think mouse_click_ocr is pretty much the only one.
Regards,
Mika / Robocorp
You can search for NotImplementedError:
https://rpaframework.org/search.html?q=NotImplementedError&check_keywords=yes&area=default#
But even out of those you may see false positives.
Source code is the final truth here.
Is there any specific keywords you were thinking about?
It’s ok Mika, NotImplementedError works well 
tks for the clarification