Frequently Asked Questions
A knowledge base for common issues and additional information.
General
How can I add additional languages to NormCap?
The prebuild packages are shipped with the
following languages English, Arabic, Chinese, German, Spanish and
Russian. If you miss a language, click the settings icon and "open
data folder..." (in the "Languages" section), then follow the
instructions in the file
add_more_languages.txt.
If you installed NormCap as Python package, refer
to the online documentation on how to install additional language
for Tesseract on your system.
How can I improve the detection accuracy?
The most import thing is to specify the correct language(s) (via
settings menu or the --language
command line argument).
Keep in mind: selecting multiple languages at once slows down the
recognition a bit.
Sometimes Tesseract struggles with recognizing text with just very
few characters, like a single word. In this case try selecting a
larger portion of text.
The pre-build NormCap packages are shipped with the
tessdata-fast
models, which offer a very good accuracy to speed compromise. But
you can also try to add the models from
tessdata
or
tessdata-best
instead as described above.
If the results are still bad, please submit a screenshot of the text
you are trying to recognize
as an issue.
Is my image/text analyzed in "the cloud"?
No. The text recognition is performed offline using the OCR
framework
Tesseract.
Is any other data send to the internet?
No telemetry data is collected and by default also no other data is
sent anywhere.
However, some (optional) features require accessing resources on the
web and therefore expose minimal information (like IP address) to
the accessed server:
-
If you enable the check for updates on start, the application
checks NormCap's releases page on github.com.
-
If you download additional languages, they are being fetched from
github.com, too.
Can I start NormCap via a keyboard shortcut?
Yes, but you'll have to configure it on your own using your
operating system's tools:
Ask your preferred search engine for support or different ways to do
this.
Are there alternatives to NormCap?
Some applications offer similar features like NormCap and might be a
good or even better alternative for you: It completely depends on
your use case and requirements. Some similar open-source Projects
are:
[Windows] How can I start NormCap with a command line argument?
To run NormCap with an argument once, run it in the
"Terminal":
C:\Users\<USER-NAME>\AppData\Local\Programs\NormCap\NormCap.exe --help
Due to the way NormCap is packaged, you will see no output in the terminal. Instead, the output is
written to a file in the same folder:
C:\Users\<USER-NAME>\AppData\Local\Programs\NormCap\NormCap.exe.log
[Windows] How can I write a log-file with debugging information?
Run NormCap with from the "Terminal" with the following argument:
C:\Users\<USER-NAME>\AppData\Local\Programs\NormCap\NormCap.exe -v debug
After NormCap exits, you can find the debug and error output in the file:
C:\Users\<USER-NAME>\AppData\Local\Programs\NormCap\NormCap.exe.log
In case of problems, create a new issue on GitHub and
include the information in the log file.
[MacOS] How can I start NormCap with a command line argument?
To run NormCap with an argument once, run it in the
"Terminal":
$ /Applications/NormCap.app/Contents/MacOS/NormCap --help
To create a launcher with command line arguments, launch
the "Script Editor" and make a new script with the desired command
line arguments, e.g.:
do shell script "exec /Applications/NormCap.app/Contents/MacOS/NormCap --tray"s
Save the script as type "Application" in the folder
"/Applications"
(When this new Application is started, an additional Icon will
show up in the Dock. If you know a way to avoid this, please
open an issue)
Troubleshooting
NormCap is not starting
Please try to start again with the -v debug
option. This should reveal more
information useful for problem-solving.
[Linux] Could not load the Qt platform plugin xcb
In case you get the following output...
$ normcap -v debug
12:06:34 - INFO - normcap.app - L:32 - Starting Normcap v0.2.0
12:06:34 - DEBUG - normcap.utils - L:199 - [QT] L:0, func: None, file: None
12:06:34 - DEBUG - normcap.utils - L:200 - [QT] QtInfoMsg - Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
12:06:34 - DEBUG - normcap.utils - L:199 - [QT] L:0, func: None, file: None
12:06:34 - DEBUG - normcap.utils - L:200 - [QT] QtFatalMsg - This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.
... the chances are, some system requirements are outdated. You can
check this with apt list "libxcb-util*"
:
$ apt list "libxcb-util*"
Listing... Done
libxcb-util-dev/hirsute 0.4.0-1 amd64
libxcb-util-dev/hirsute 0.4.0-1 i386
libxcb-util0-dev/hirsute 0.4.0-1 amd64
libxcb-util0-dev/hirsute 0.4.0-1 i386
libxcb-util1/hirsute,now 0.4.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libxcb-util1/hirsute 0.4.0-1 i386
Is only libxcb-util0
shown but
libxcb-util1
is missing? Then you can try to create a
symlink for the missing version:
sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-util.so.0 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-util.so.1
[Linux] Normcap does not show up in system tray
Is your display environment Gnome Shell? Then you probably need to
install a
Gnome Shell extension
to support showing applications in the top bar, e.g.:
[Linux] Normcap doesn't show a notification after capture
NormCap's notifications depend on the system tray functionality. Try
running normcap with the --tray
flag, and if nothing is
shown in the system tray, proceed like in the question above.
Development
"No such file or directory" error when running
briefcase build
To verify, if this is the issue you are facing, run the docker image
interactively and try to run the
linuxdeploy-*.AppImage
file there:
$ docker run -it \
--volume /home/<USER>/<PROJECT PATH>/normcap/linux:/app:z \
--volume /home/<USER>/.briefcase:/home/brutus/.briefcase:z \
--env VERSION=0.2.0 briefcase/eu.dynobo.normcap:py3.9 \
/bin/bash
$ /home/brutus/.briefcase/tools/linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage
If that results in a `No such file or directory` error, according to
this
issue
and
this one
a workaround is to correct the "magic" bytes of the AppImage. This
worked for me:
sed '0,/AI\x02/{s|AI\x02|\x00\x00\x00|}' -i linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage