Textify (OCR)

Textify is a Dart package that provides utilities for working with text representations in a specific character set. It is designed to handle text processing tasks for the English language and a limited set of characters.

It is 100% cross-platform, utilizing native Dart and Flutter code, and works offline without any package dependencies.

Why Textify?

Textify addresses common limitations of existing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solutions:

Lightweight: Most OCR libraries are heavy and often rely on external system dependencies or remote cloud services, complicating deployment and increasing costs.
Simplified Setup: Popular solutions like Tesseract require complex build configurations, including C/C++ compilation, which can be difficult to manage across platforms.
Web Compatibility: Many OCR solutions do not support Flutter web clients, limiting their cross-platform usability.

Textify overcomes these issues with a lightweight, pure Dart implementation that works seamlessly across all Flutter platforms, including web, without external dependencies.

Installation

Add this to your package's pubspec.yaml file:

dependencies:
  textify:

Then run:

flutter pub get

How to use

Here's a basic example of how to use Textify:

import 'package:textify/textify.dart';

// load your image
ui.Image inputImage = await loadImage('scan.png');

// instentiate Textify once
Textify textify = await Textify().init();

// extract text from the image
String extractedText = await textify.getTextFromImage(image: inputImage);

print(text);

Features

Extracts text from clean digital images
Supports standard fonts like "Arial", "Courier", "Helvetica", "Times New Roman"
Fully cross-platform
Pure Dart and Flutter implementation
Offline functionality
No external package dependencies

Limitations

Supported for clean digital images (no handwriting)
Limited character set support
No support for special formatting (italic, variable size etc.)
Text must be free of images and framing (aka no borders)

Supported Characters

This package intentionally supports only the following characters:

Uppercase letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Lowercase letters: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Digits: 0123456789
Punctuation marks: /\(){}[]<>,;:.!@#$&*-+=?

Any text containing characters outside of this set may not be processed correctly or may result in errors.

Input image - Clean Digital Image Guidelines

What Makes a Clean Digital Image?

Font Selection

Use Helvetica (sans-serif) or Courier (monospace)
Keep font size consistent and large (12pt+ size)
Maintain uniform character width, especially with Courier

Text Spacing Requirements

Letters must not touch or overlap
Maintain consistent gaps between words
Use standard line spacing (1.5 recommended)
Keep clear margins around text

Best Practices

Clean, computer-generated documents
Scanned image of high resolution: Minimum 300+ DPI
Format: TIFF or PNG preferred
Use OCR-friendly fonts
High contrast between text and background
Clean, white background
Black text for optimal readability
Remove any background noise or artifacts
Keep text alignment consistent
Avoid decorative or script fonts
Minimal background noise (e.g., no watermarks)
High contrast between text and background
No handwritten or italic text
Isolated characters (not touching other artifacts)

Quick Validation Checklist

X Text is clearly separated
X Fonts are similar to Helvetica, Courier, Times New Roman
X Size is consistent throughout
X No touching characters
X Clean background
X High contrast
X Proper resolution

Language Support

Textify is currently designed to work with the English language only. While it may handle some text in other languages that use the supported character set, its functionality is optimized and intended for English text processing.

Components

Call Graph

Please contribute and report issues on the GitHub repository. github.com/vteam-com/textify