Tesseract OCR

Table of Contents

• Tesseract OCR
  • About
  • Brief history
  • Installing Tesseract
  • Running Tesseract
  • For developers
  • Support
  • License
  • Dependencies
  • Latest Version of README

About

This package contains an OCR engine - libtesseract and a command line program - tesseract.

Tesseract 4 adds a new neural net (LSTM) based OCR engine which is focused on line recognition, but also still supports the legacy Tesseract OCR engine of Tesseract 3 which works by recognizing character patterns. Compatibility with Tesseract 3 is enabled by using the Legacy OCR Engine mode (--oem 0).
It also needs traineddata files which support the legacy engine, for example those from the tessdata repository.

Stefan Weil is the current lead developer. Ray Smith was the lead developer until 2017. The maintainer is Zdenko Podobny. For a list of contributors see AUTHORS
and GitHub's log of contributors.

Tesseract has unicode (UTF-8) support, and can recognize more than 100 languages "out of the box".

Tesseract supports various image formats including PNG, JPEG and TIFF.

Tesseract supports various output formats: plain text, hOCR (HTML), PDF, invisible-text-only PDF, TSV, ALTO and PAGE.

You should note that in many cases, in order to get better OCR results, you'll need to improve the quality of the image you are giving Tesseract.

This project does not include a GUI application. If you need one, please see the 3rdParty documentation.

Tesseract can be trained to recognize other languages.
See Tesseract Training for more information.

Brief history

Tesseract was originally developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol UK and at Hewlett-Packard Co, Greeley Colorado USA between 1985 and 1994, with some more changes made in 1996 to port to Windows, and some C++izing in 1998. In 2005 Tesseract was open sourced by HP. From 2006 until August 2017 it was developed by Google.

Major version 5 is the current stable version and started with release
5.0.0 on November 30, 2021. Newer minor versions and bugfix versions are available from
GitHub.

Latest source code is available from main branch on GitHub.
Open issues can be found in issue tracker,
and planning documentation.

See Release Notes
and Change Log for more details of the releases.

Installing Tesseract

You can either Install Tesseract via pre-built binary package
or build it from source.

Before building Tesseract from source, please check that your system has a compiler which is one of the supported compilers.

Running Tesseract

Basic command line usage:

tesseract imagename outputbase [-l lang] [--oem ocrenginemode] [--psm pagesegmode] [configfiles...]

For more information about the vario