csmu-cenr/discourse-ocr-uploads

Discourse OCR Uploads

This plugin uses the Google Cloud Vision API to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the images in the first post of a topic. It will then create a second post containing the recognized text.

Installation

To install the plugin see https://meta.discourse.org/t/install-a-plugin/19157

Configuration

• Create a service account on Google Cloud Platform Creating and managing service accounts | Cloud IAM Documentation and create a key. Google will trigger a download of a JSON file. Open this in any text editor.
• Copy the value of the client_id field into the discourse ocr uploads google client id setting.
• Copy the value of the client_email field into the discourse ocr uploads google client email setting.
• Copy the value of the private_key field into the discourse ocr uploads google private key setting. Make sure to remove the surrounding quotes but leave the -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- in the beginning and the -----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n at the end.
• Enable the plugin

The plugin can be enabled on a per-category basis. Go to the category settings tab, look for the OCR Uploads heading and check Perform OCR on the images in the first post of a topic.

Usage

In the eligible categories, any first post in a topic will be scanned for uploaded images. These will be processed by the Cloud Vision API and a second post will appear containing the recognized text.