Portable version for Windows?

[GeniusBroccoli]

Are there any plans to make portable builds? Or maybe there is a way to make an installed program portable?

[dynobo]

Good idea, @GeniusBroccoli ! As it is quite low priority for me, I'd be happy about contributions to support this!

[koppor]

Just as an idea: To do a little step here, maybe one could replace the dependency on Tesseract by using Window's build in OCR functionality (this refs #599 (comment)).

[dynobo]

@koppor , good idea

The docs, though, seem to indicate, that it might not be possible to use the built-in OCR in portable apps:

Remarks
APIs in the Windows.Media.Ocr namespace are only supported for desktop apps with package identity. This means that the app is installed and run from an MSIX package. For more information, see Features that require package identity. For information about calling these APIs from a desktop app, see Call Windows Runtime APIs in desktop apps.

Another question I couldn't answer, yet: What's the privacy statement for using Windows OCR? Is it 100% offline? Or are samples being send to the cloud?

[dynobo]

A good starting point for working on this issue might be the briefcase docs:

It seems like briefcase (the tool used to package NormCap) already supports a zip format.

So, a first step might be to modify NormCap's build script to use that option, run bundle/build.py and see if something useful drops out.