Since you&#39;re on a Linux box, I would highly recommend Google&#39;s open source project [ocropus](http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/).  

It&#39;s not PHP, but I think it will be your best option.  Of course you can call it from within PHP via `exec`.  Its mature and has a lot of options.  From the project site:

&gt;The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90&#39;s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods. 

There is also another open source project, [tesseract](http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/).  I&#39;ve used this in the past as well and have been pleased with the results.  Includes training, limiting your alphabet, etc.

Have you seen phpOCR classes of Andrey Kucherenko  ?
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2874-PHP-Recognize-text-objects-in-graphical-images.html
It&#39;s an old article but may help you.

I&#39;m wondering what the difference is between using a static const and an enum hack when using template metaprogramming techniques.

EX: (Fibonacci via TMP)

    template&lt; int n &gt; struct TMPFib {
      static const int val =
        TMPFib&lt; n-1 &gt;::val + TMPFib&lt; n-2 &gt;::val;
    };

    template&lt;&gt; struct TMPFib&lt; 1 &gt; {
      static const int val = 1;
    };

    template&lt;&gt; struct TMPFib&lt; 0 &gt; {
      static const int val = 0;
    };

vs.

    template&lt; int n &gt; struct TMPFib {
      enum {
        val = TMPFib&lt; n-1 &gt;::val + TMPFib&lt; n-2 &gt;::val
      };
    };

    template&lt;&gt; struct TMPFib&lt; 1 &gt; {
      enum { val = 1 };
    };

    template&lt;&gt; struct TMPFib&lt; 0 &gt; {
      enum { val = 0 };
    };

Why use one over the other? I&#39;ve read that the enum hack was used before static const was supported inside classes, but why use it now?


Template Metaprogramming - Difference Between Using Enum Hack and Static Const

How do I reference `this_prize.left` or `this_prize.right` using a variable?

    from collections import namedtuple
    import random 
    
    Prize = namedtuple(&quot;Prize&quot;, [&quot;left&quot;, &quot;right&quot;]) 
    this_prize = Prize(&quot;FirstPrize&quot;, &quot;SecondPrize&quot;)
    
    if random.random() &gt; .5:
        choice = &quot;left&quot;
    else:
        choice = &quot;right&quot;
        
    # retrieve the value of &quot;left&quot; or &quot;right&quot; depending on the choice
    print(&quot;You won&quot;, this_prize.choice)
    
    AttributeError: &#39;Prize&#39; object has no attribute &#39;choice&#39;
        




Accessing an attribute using a variable in Python

Are there any free OCR libraries that work with PHP or Python on a Linux server? The idea is to be able to upload an image and pull out characters from it, or allow users to &quot;draw characters&quot;, and parse them out of said image.

How can I implement OCR on a website using PHP?

<p>Are there any free OCR libraries that work with PHP or Python on a Linux server? The idea is to be able to upload an image and pull out characters from it, or allow users to "draw characters", and parse them out of said image.</p>


I have a string such as:

&gt; &quot;0123456789&quot;

And I need to split *each* character into an array.

I, for the hell of it, tried:

    explode(&#39;&#39;, &#39;123545789&#39;);

But it gave me the obvious: **Warning: No delimiter defined in explode)** ..

How would I come across this? I can&#39;t see any method off hand, especially just a function.





PHP: Split string into array, like explode with no delimiter

I am trying to run this Example #1 from this page: http://php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php


    &lt;?php
    function inverse($x) {
        if (!$x) {
            throw new Exception(&#39;Division by zero.&#39;);
        }
        return 1/$x;
    }
    try {
        echo inverse(5) . &quot;\n&quot;;
        echo inverse(0) . &quot;\n&quot;;
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        echo &#39;Caught exception: &#39;,  $e-&gt;getMessage(), &quot;\n&quot;;
    }
    // Continue execution
    echo &quot;Hello World\n&quot;;
    ?&gt;

However instead of the desired output I get:

    0.2
    Fatal error: Uncaught exception &#39;Exception&#39; with message &#39;Division by zero.&#39; 
    in xxx:
    7 Stack trace: #0 xxx(14): inverse(0) #1 {main} thrown in xxx on line 7

The developer environment I am using is `UniServer 3.5` with `PHP 5.2.3`


Try/Catch block in PHP not catching Exception

I&#39;m just wondering how I could remove the text between a set of parentheses and the parentheses themselves in php.

Example :

ABC (Test1)

I would like it to delete (Test1) and only leave ABC

Thanks

Remove Text Between Parentheses PHP

I&#39;ve tried to use the PHP function [getimagesize][1], but I was unable to extract the image width and height as an integer value.

How can I achieve this?


  [1]: http://php.net/manual/en/function.getimagesize.php

Get Image Height and Width as integer values?

I am a lone developer most of my time, working on a number of big, mainly PHP-based projects. I want to professionalize and automate how changes to the code base are handled, and create a Continuous Integration process that makes the transition to work in a team possible without having to make fundamental changes. 

What I am doing right now is, I have a local test environment for every project; I use SVN for each project; changes are tested locally, and then transferred to the on-line version, usually via FTP. API documentation is generated manually from the source code; Unit tests are something I am getting into slowly, and it&#39;s not yet part of my daily routine.

The &quot;build cycle&quot; I am envisioning would do the following:

  * A changeset gets checked into SVN after having been tested locally.

  * I start the build process. The SVN HEAD revision gets checked out, modified if necessary, and made ready for upload.
 
  * API Documentation gets generated automatically - if I haven&#39;t set it up in detail yet, using a default template, scanning the whole code base.

  * The new revision is deployed to the remote location via FTP (Including some directory renaming, chmodding, importing databases, and the likes.) This is something I already like [phing][1] for very much, but I&#39;m open for alternatives of course.

  * Unit tests residing in a predefined location are run. I am informed about their failure or success using E-Mail, RSS or (preferably) HTML output that I can grab and put into a web page.

  * (optionally) a end-user &quot;changelog&quot; text file in a pre-defined location gets updated with a pre-defined part of the commit message (&quot;It is now possible to filter for both &quot;foo&quot; and &quot;bar&quot; at the same time). This message is not necessarily identical with the SVN commit message, which probably contains much more internal information.

  * Stuff like code metrics, code style checking and so on are not my primary focus right now, but on the long run, they certainly will. Solutions that bring this out-of-the-box are very kindly looked upon.
 

I am looking for

  * **Feedback and experiences** from people who are or were in a similar situation, and have successfully implemented a solution for this

  * Especially, **good step-by-step tutorials and walkthroughs** on how to set this up

  * Solutions that provide **as much automation as possible**, for example by creating  a skeleton API, test cases and so on for each new project.

and also

  * **Product recommendations**. What I know so far is [phing][2]/ant for building, and [phpUnderControl][3] or [Hudson][4] for the reporting part. I like them all as far as I can see, but I have of course no detailed experience with them.


I am *swamped* with work, so I have a strong inclination towards simple solutions. On the other hand, if a feature is missing, I&#39;ll cry about it being too limited. :) Point-and-click solutions are welcome, too. I am also to commercial product recommendations that can work with PHP projects.

**My setup**

I am working on Windows locally (7, to be exact) and most client projects are run on a LAMP stack, often on shared hosting (= no remote SSH).
I am looking for solutions that I can run in my own environment. I am ready to set up a Linux VM for this, no problem. Hosted solutions are interesting for me only if they provide all of the aspects described, or are flexible enough to interact with the other parts of the process.

&gt; **Bounty**
&gt; I am accepting the answer that I feel will give me the most mileage. There is a lot of excellent input here, I wish I could accept more than one answer. Thanks everyone!


  [1]: http://phing.info/
  [2]: http://phing.info/
  [3]: http://phpundercontrol.org/about.html
  [4]: http://hudson-ci.org/  

Setting up a deployment / build / CI cycle for PHP projects

How do I load external font files into an HTML document.

Example:
 Make the text &quot;blah blah blah blah blah blah blah&quot; a custom font from a TTF file in the same directory using HTML CSS and/or JAVASCRIPT

How do I load external fonts into an HTML document?

I have some text that is displayed at run time in a textblock. I want
the font size to be the biggest it can be to fill the area that is
given. I think I have the textblock setup correctly to &quot;autosize&quot; and
I try to increase the font size till the textblock is bigger than than
its parent then decrease the font size by 1. The problem is I can&#39;t
get the control to redraw/recompute its size.

Is the a better way to do that? Or is there a way I can make my method work?

WPF TextBlock font resize to fill available space in a Grid

I&#39;m trying to define a GUI layout using XML files in Android. As far as I can find out, there is no way to specify that your widgets should use a custom font (e.g. one you&#39;ve placed in assets/font/) in XML files and you can only use the system installed fonts.

I know that, in the Java code, I could change the font of each widget manually using unique IDs. Alternatively, I could iterate over all the widgets in Java to make this change, but this would probably be very slow.

What other options do I have? Is there any better ways to making widgets that have a custom look? I don&#39;t particularly want to have to manually change the font for every new widget I add.

Custom fonts and XML layouts (Android)

How can I define *underlined* text in an Android layout `xml` file?


Can I underline text in an Android layout?

I&#39;m looking at the [MDC page for the @font-face CSS rule][1], but I don&#39;t get one thing. I have separate files for **bold**, *italic* and ***bold + italic***. How can I embed all three files in one `@font-face` rule? For example, if I have:

    @font-face {
        font-family: &quot;DejaVu Sans&quot;;
        src: url(&quot;./fonts/DejaVuSans.ttf&quot;) format(&quot;ttf&quot;);
    }
    strong {
        font-family: &quot;DejaVu Sans&quot;;
        font-weight: bold;
    }

The browser will not know which font to be used for bold (because that file is DejaVuSansBold.ttf), so it will default to something I probably don&#39;t want. How can I tell the browser all the different variants I have for a certain font?

  [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/@font-face


How to add multiple font files for the same font?

Is it possible to limit the set of characters that [tesseract][1] is looking for (e.g. search only for letters a-z)? That would improve my results greatly.


  [1]: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Limit characters tesseract is looking for

I need an open OCR library which is able to scan complex printed math formulas (for example some formulas which were generated via LaTeX). I want to get some LaTeX-like output (or just some AST-like data).

Is there something like this already? Or are current OCR technics just able to parse line-oriented text?

(Note that I also posted [this question on Metaoptimize](http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-formulas) because some people there might have additional knowledge.)

The problem was also described by OpenAI as [im2latex](https://openai.com/requests-for-research/#im2latex).


OCR lib for math formulas

I want to create a application which gets the word under the cursor (not only for text fields), but I can&#39;t find how to do that. Using OCR is pretty hard. The only thing I&#39;ve seen working is the Deskperience components. They support a &#39;native&#39; way, but I they cost a lot. Now I&#39;m trying to figure out what is this &#39;native&#39; way (maybe somehow of hooking). Any help will be appreciated.


**EDIT:**
I found a way, but it gets only the whole text of the control. Any idea how to get only the word under the cursor from the whole text?

How to get the word under the cursor in Windows?

### Background

For my final project at university, I&#39;m developing a vehicle license plate detection application. I consider myself an intermediate programmer, however my mathematics knowledge lacks anything above secondary school, which makes producing the right formulas harder than it probably should be.

I&#39;ve spend a good amount of time looking up academic papers such as:

 - [Detecting Vehicle License Plates in Images][1]  
 - [Robust License Plate Detection using Image Saliency][2]  
 - [Local Enhancement of Car Image for License Plate Detection][3]   
  


When it comes to the math, I&#39;m lost. Due to this testing various graphic images proved productive, for example:

![alt text][4]

to

![alt text][5]

However this approach only worked to that particular image, and if the techniques were applied to different images, I&#39;m sure a poorer conversion would occur. I&#39;ve read about a formula called the &quot;bottom hat morphology transform&quot;, which does the following:

 &gt; Basically, the trans- formation keeps all the dark details of the picture, and eliminates everything else (including bigger dark regions and light regions).

I can&#39;t find much information on this, however the image within the documentation near the end of the report shows its effectiveness. 

### Other constraints
  
- Developing in C#  
- Confining the project to UK registration plates only  
- I can choose the images to convert as a demonstration  

# Question

I need advice on what transformation techniques I should focus on developing, and what algorithms can help me.  

EDIT: New information present on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4727119/continued-vehicle-license-plate-detection


  [1]:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/266575/Detecting-Vehicle-License-Plates-in-Images
  [2]: http://www.cic.unb.br/~mylene/PI_2010_2/ICIP10/pdfs/0003945.pdf
  [3]: http://www.eurasip.org/Proceedings/Eusipco/Eusipco2007/Papers/d3l-b05.pdf
  [4]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/xPxvv.jpg
  [5]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/y71r9.jpg

What are good algorithms for vehicle license plate detection?

I want to use `tesseract` to recognize only numbers. The problem is that I have mixture of numbers &amp; letters and when I use `SetVariable(&quot;tessedit_char_whitelist&quot;, &quot;0123456789&quot;)`  
for every symbol tesseract returns wrong digit.

Can I set a threshold value so that `tesseract` omits the symbols with low resemblance?  

NOTE: I set `tesseract` to recognize only digits so there is no confusion between O and 0.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Moshe	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Php	nategood	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Php	Daniel D	View Answer on Stackoverflow

How can I implement OCR on a website using PHP?

Php Problem Overview

Php Solutions

Solution 1 - Php

Solution 2 - Php

Accessing an attribute using a variable in Python

Template Metaprogramming - Difference Between Using Enum Hack and Static Const

Attributions