afarntrog / searchable-classifieds

This Django app converts JPEG classifieds into searchable classifieds using tesseract OCR

Problem:

My local newspaper has local job classifieds. However, they are online only as a flipbook. Since flipbooks are in JPEG format they are not searchable. And it is too tedious to look through each one to find something in my interests.

Solution:

I created this Python Django app to scrape the classifieds JPEG and then using tesseract OCR extracted the text. Then I displayed them in a nice format and added search to the app. So now you can easily find jobs with your desired keywords.

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Heroku, Django and tesseract

This doc will walk you through setting up tesseract on Heroku (i'm using django)

Steps

1) Add heroku-apt-buildpack using the command:

This is the stable version. See the source repository

$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 heroku-community/apt

2) Add Aptfile to project directory

$ touch Aptfile

3) Add the folowing to the Aptfile

tesseract-ocr-eng is the English language file for tesseract.

tesseract-ocr
tesseract-ocr-eng

4) Get path to the data downloaded by the tesseract-ocr-eng package

We will use this path for the next step

$ heroku run bash
$ find -iname tessdata # this will give us the path we need

You can exit heroku shell now exit

5) Now set a heroku config variable named TESSDATA_PREFIX to path

Set a heroku config variable named TESSDATA_PREFIX to the path returned from find -iname tessdata cmnd above

$ heroku config:set TESSDATA_PREFIX=./.apt/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata

Now set heroku set a heroku config variable named TESSDATA_PREFIX to the path returned from find -iname tessdata

6) Push changes to heroku

Set a heroku config variable named TESSDATA_PREFIX to the path returned from find -iname tessdata cmnd above

$ git push heroku master

I hope this helps. Let me know if it works for you.