Just got a quick heads up from fyysik to let me know that the Russian developer, Gerasim ''3dEyes'' Troyeglazov, has developed a BeOS native OCR system.

Based on GOCR (which has a much older command line port here), this system uses an image-to-text translator, and lets you load an image containing text in any translation kit application, such as ShowImage, and save to text.

News is here, for those of you who can speak Russian, but for those of us who can't, here are direct links to a screenshot and the translator download.

Currently, the translator works best on 300dpi colour or greyscale (not black and white) scans. Results can be unpredictable on other media.

3dEyes has also been working on a DjVu image translator for BeOS, which is an image format designed for archiving print media, and has worked on porting SAMBA 2.x and 3.x to BeOS/BONE, amongst other projects.