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.

Greyscale sprites

Sleuth will accept greyscale sprites and convert them into monochrome sprites. Using the Input and processing preferences dialogue box, the user can determine the levels of grey converted to white in this process. A Pre-sharpening facility is provided that will generally improve the quality of degraded text during conversion.

Why is Sleuth 2 faster than Sleuth 2?

The main reasons are:

• Sleuth 2 uses a quicker and less accurate initial segmentation of each line into letters as described earlier.
• Sleuth 2 has a non context sensitive spellchecker and no user dictionary.
• Sleuth 2 does less image processing.
• Sleuth 2 has been trained on fewer fonts and on a limited range of text 'quality' settings.

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

© Copyright 3QD Developments - 04/09/2026