ocropy is a minimal wrapper around the optical character recognition software ocropus [1] for doing quick and dirty OCR jobs. It converts TIFF, JPEG and PNG images to grayscale before attempting to do the ocr, and internally handles some temporary files for you. Usage: import ocropy hocr = ocropy.hocr("image.png") If you would like to further process the image, and don't want to go through the effort of reading it again you can get the PIL Image object that was used to convert the image to grayscale: hocr, image = hocr_with_image("page.png") And you can pass it a URL for an image if that's more convenient: hocr = ocropy.hocr("http://example.com/image.tif") Requirements: * ocropus (available to ubuntu systems w/ apt-get) * PIL License: Public Domain <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/> Contributors: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>