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tesseract

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:31:10 +0800

tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Tesseract OCR

Tesseract OCR

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 2018. 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 November 2018 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 various command line options use tesseract --help or man tesseract.

Examples can be found in the documentation.

For developers

Developers can use libtesseract C or C++ API to build their own application. If you need bindings to libtesseract for other programming languages, please see the wrapper section in the AddOns documentation.

Documentation of Tesseract generated from source code by doxygen can be found on tesseract-ocr.github.io.

Support

Before you submit an issue, please review the guidelines for this repository.

For support, first read the documentation, particularly the FAQ to see if your problem is addressed there. If not, search the Tesseract user forum, the Tesseract developer forum and past issues, and if you still can’t find what you need, ask for support in the mailing-lists.

Mailing-lists:

tesseract-ocr - For tesseract users.
tesseract-dev - For tesseract developers.

Please report an issue only for a bug, not for asking questions.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

NOTE: This software depends on other packages that may be licensed under different open source licenses.

Tesseract uses Leptonica library which essentially uses a BSD 2-clause license.

Dependencies

Tesseract uses Leptonica library for opening input images (e.g. not documents like pdf). It is suggested to use leptonica with built-in support for zlib, png and tiff (for multipage tiff).

Latest Version of README

For the latest online version of the README.md see:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/main/README.md

OCRmyPDF

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:31:01 +0800

ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted.

ocrmypdf                      # it's a scriptable command line program
   -l eng+fra                 # it supports multiple languages
   --rotate-pages             # it can fix pages that are misrotated
   --deskew                   # it can deskew crooked PDFs!
   --title "My PDF"           # it can change output metadata
   --jobs 4                   # it uses multiple cores by default
   --output-type pdfa         # it produces PDF/A by default
   input_scanned.pdf          # takes PDF input (or images)
   output_searchable.pdf      # produces validated PDF output

See the release notes for details on the latest changes.

Main features

Generates a searchable PDF/A file from a regular PDF
Places OCR text accurately below the image to ease copy / paste
Keeps the exact resolution of the original embedded images
When possible, inserts OCR information as a “lossless” operation without disrupting any other content
Optimizes PDF images, often producing files smaller than the input file
If requested, deskews and/or cleans the image before performing OCR
Validates input and output files
Distributes work across all available CPU cores
Uses Tesseract OCR engine to recognize more than 100 languages
Keeps your private data private.
Scales properly to handle files with thousands of pages.
Battle-tested on millions of PDFs.

For details: please consult the documentation.

Motivation

I searched the web for a free command line tool to OCR PDF files: I found many, but none of them were really satisfying:

Either they produced PDF files with misplaced text under the image (making copy/paste impossible)
Or they did not handle accents and multilingual characters
Or they changed the resolution of the embedded images
Or they generated ridiculously large PDF files
Or they crashed when trying to OCR
Or they did not produce valid PDF files
On top of that none of them produced PDF/A files (format dedicated for long time storage)

…so I decided to develop my own tool.

Installation

Linux, Windows, macOS and FreeBSD are supported. Docker images are also available, for both x64 and ARM.

Operating system	Install command
Debian, Ubuntu	`apt install ocrmypdf`
Windows Subsystem for Linux	`apt install ocrmypdf`
Fedora	`dnf install ocrmypdf`
macOS (Homebrew)	`brew install ocrmypdf`
macOS (MacPorts)	`port install ocrmypdf`
macOS (nix)	`nix-env -i ocrmypdf`
LinuxBrew	`brew install ocrmypdf`
FreeBSD	`pkg install py-ocrmypdf`
Ubuntu Snap	`snap install ocrmypdf`

For everyone else, see our documentation for installation steps.

Languages

OCRmyPDF uses Tesseract for OCR, and relies on its language packs. For Linux users, you can often find packages that provide language packs:

# Display a list of all Tesseract language packs
apt-cache search tesseract-ocr

# Debian/Ubuntu users
apt-get install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim  # Example: Install Chinese Simplified language pack

# Arch Linux users
pacman -S tesseract-data-eng tesseract-data-deu # Example: Install the English and German language packs

# brew macOS users
brew install tesseract-lang

You can then pass the -l LANG argument to OCRmyPDF to give a hint as to what languages it should search for. Multiple languages can be requested.

OCRmyPDF supports Tesseract 4.1.1+. It will automatically use whichever version it finds first on the PATH environment variable. On Windows, if PATH does not provide a Tesseract binary, we use the highest version number that is installed according to the Windows Registry.

Documentation and support

Once OCRmyPDF is installed, the built-in help which explains the command syntax and options can be accessed via:

`1`	`ocrmypdf --help`

Our documentation is served on Read the Docs.

Please report issues on our GitHub issues page, and follow the issue template for quick response.

Feature demo

# Add an OCR layer and convert to PDF/A
ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf

# Convert an image to single page PDF
ocrmypdf input.jpg output.pdf

# Add OCR to a file in place (only modifies file on success)
ocrmypdf myfile.pdf myfile.pdf

# OCR with non-English languages (look up your language's ISO 639-3 code)
ocrmypdf -l fra LeParisien.pdf LeParisien.pdf

# OCR multilingual documents
ocrmypdf -l eng+fra Bilingual-English-French.pdf Bilingual-English-French.pdf

# Deskew (straighten crooked pages)
ocrmypdf --deskew input.pdf output.pdf

For more features, see the documentation.

Requirements

In addition to the required Python version, OCRmyPDF requires external program installations of Ghostscript and Tesseract OCR. OCRmyPDF is pure Python, and runs on pretty much everything: Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD.

Press & Media

Going paperless with OCRmyPDF
Converting a scanned document into a compressed searchable PDF with redactions
c’t 1-2014, page 59: Detailed presentation of OCRmyPDF v1.0 in the leading German IT magazine c’t
heise Open Source, 09/2014: Texterkennung mit OCRmyPDF
heise Durchsuchbare PDF-Dokumente mit OCRmyPDF erstellen
Excellent Utilities: OCRmyPDF
LinuxUser Texterkennung mit OCRmyPDF und Scanbd automatisieren
Y Combinator discussion

Business enquiries

OCRmyPDF would not be the software that it is today without companies and users choosing to provide support for feature development and consulting enquiries. We are happy to discuss all enquiries, whether for extending the existing feature set, or integrating OCRmyPDF into a larger system.

License

The OCRmyPDF software is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0). This license permits integration of OCRmyPDF with other code, included commercial and closed source, but asks you to publish source-level modifications you make to OCRmyPDF.

Some components of OCRmyPDF have other licenses, as indicated by standard SPDX license identifiers or the DEP5 copyright and licensing information file. Generally speaking, non-core code is licensed under MIT, and the documentation and test files are licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

Disclaimer

The software is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

Tesseract on Producthunt daily

tesseract

tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Tesseract OCR

Table of Contents

About

Brief history

Installing Tesseract

Running Tesseract

For developers

Support

License

Dependencies

Latest Version of README

OCRmyPDF

ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

Main features

Motivation

Installation

Languages

Documentation and support

Feature demo

Requirements

Press & Media

Business enquiries

License

Disclaimer