Sleuth 1 Note
Sleuth 1 is a legacy product which has been superceeded by Sleuth 2 and Sleuth 3. It's included here because, unlike the later versions of Sleuth, it will run on first generation Acorn computers with only 2GB of RAM. If you are using RISC OS 3.5 or later please have a look at Sleuth 3instead.

The Sleuth series of applications (Sleuth, Sleuth 2 and Slueth 3) take scanned documents and turn them into fully editable text. Sleuth uses a process called OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This is a process whereby text is extracted from a scanned image and converted into a plain text file. OCR has been available for some time on other machine platforms and accuracy has been steadily improving. Sleuth 3 can be used with the majority of scanners available for RISC OS computers.

Twain drivers

Sleuth supports TWAIN to allow direct scanning into the package. To use this facility you must have a copy of TWAIN, an appropriate scanner and Scanner Driver. TWAIN and scanner drivers can be downloaded from:

https://www.davidpilling.com/wiki/index.php/TWAIN

TWAIN supports the Select and Acquire options on the Sleuth Scan menu.

Without Twain Drivers

You can still use Sleuth even if you don't have compatible Twain drivers. You can scan from another RISC OS application and then import the images into Sleuth or you can even import images that have been scanned via Windows, mac OS X or Linux.

Please note that only Sleuth 3 is compatible with 32bit versions of RISC OS.

© Copyright 3QD Developments - 04/09/2026