Feauture Request: OCR

[sdaly]

It would be very useful if Ranorex could support optical character recognition. In one of our applications we are going to have to use image based testing on certain legacy controls. The items I am trying to work with are just text though. It would be great if we could do the following -

Dim text as Ranorex.Text = Ranorex.OCR.FindSingle("String to find", adapter.DefaultSearchTimeout)
text.click

[Support Team]

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion.
OCR is already on our internal feature request list and will be available in a future release of Ranorex.

Regards,
Peter
Ranorex Team

[sdaly]

Hi

That's good news! Do you have any idea of when this feature will be released? This will have an influence on our strategy!

Thanks
Scott

[Support Team]

Scott,

We are currently experimenting with (pixel-based) OCR, but this is quite challenging to get right.
Another way, which will work in many cases, especially with legacy controls and completely owner-drawn applications, is capturing GDI text API calls.

Because both variants require a certain amount of voodoo, and largely depend on the AUT, there will probably be an experimental release before we integrate it into our API and tools.

For the OCR part, feel free to send screenshots of your applications/controls to [email protected] and we will add it to our test/training image collection.

Michael
Ranorex Team

[sdaly]

I have sent an email with some test images....

[atom]

Hiya

We had a problem with owner drawn menu items from BCGSoft
We solved that by using this little text capture tool:

http://www.skesoft.com/

It can capture text from any window handle
Its not always 100% accurate - but with a little post parsing if fits our needs
Its cheap too!

Regards

[Support Team]

Just a short note: The software you mentioned uses an approach similar to what we are currently experimenting with and what Micheal described in his post as "capturing GDI text API calls". I don't know the software from BCGSoft, but the approach looks quite promising for GDI based applications.

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Team

[atom]

Yep OCR from a bitmap as far as I know is quite tricky
Above tool uses Windows API hooks as you mentioned
Its not 100% perfect - so if Ranorex can do better, I will be most pleased!

[sdaly]

Atom - I just tried that tool, it works very well grabbing the text for our legacy app. I'm wondering though how I would know the location of the text on the screen to click it?

Ranorex - If this approach could be implemented so we could do the following, I will be amazed!

Dim textItem As Ranorex.text = host.local.GDI.findSingle("textToFind")
textItem.Click

[Support Team]

m textItem As Ranorex.text = host.local.GDI.findSingle("textToFind")
textItem.Click

Thanks for your suggestions! We will consider them and try to integrate such a feature as seamless as possible into the existing Ranorex API

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Team

[timpowell6]

I see the last post in this thread regarding OCR was 2 years ago. Any updates to how close you are to adding OCR to Ranorex since then? Is there a Ranorex Beta available that includes OCR? I'm using QTP 11 and the OCR on there works great, but considering a less expensive tool with a run-time license structure, and I don't want to go back to full-on bitmap checkpoints on our PDA apps. Thanks!

[Support Team]

Hi,

There are currently no plans for OCR. Did you already check if Ranorex is able to identify your elements, if not I would suggest downloading the free trial version of Ranorex in order to check if it meets all your needs.
Here is the link to the download page: Free Trial.

Regards,
Markus
Ranorex Support Team