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

This package contains anOCR engine -libtesseract and acommand line program -tesseract.

Tesseract 4 adds a new neural net (LSTM) basedOCR 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 needstraineddata files which support the legacy engine, for example those from thetessdata 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 seeAUTHORSand GitHub's log ofcontributors.

Tesseract hasunicode (UTF-8) support, and canrecognizemore than 100 languages "out of the box".

Tesseract supportsvarious image formats including PNG, JPEG and TIFF.

Tesseract supportsvarious 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 toimprove the quality of the image you are giving Tesseract.

This projectdoes not include a GUI application. If you need one, please see the3rdParty documentation.

Tesseractcan be trained to recognize other languages.SeeTesseract Training for more information.

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 release5.0.0 on November 30, 2021. Newer minor versions and bugfix versions are available fromGitHub.

Latest source code is available frommain branch on GitHub.Open issues can be found inissue tracker,andplanning documentation.

SeeRelease NotesandChange Log for more details of the releases.

You can eitherInstall Tesseract via pre-built binary packageorbuild it from source.

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

Basiccommand line usage:

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

For more information about the various command line options usetesseract --help orman tesseract.

Examples can be found in thedocumentation.

Developers can uselibtesseractC orC++ API to build their own application. If you need bindings tolibtesseract for other programming languages, please see thewrapper section in the AddOns documentation.

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

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

For support, first read thedocumentation,particularly theFAQ to see if your problem is addressed there.If not, search theTesseract user forum, theTesseract developer forum andpast 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 abug, not for asking questions.

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-2.0Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, softwaredistributed 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 andlimitations under the License.

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

Tesseract usesLeptonica library which essentiallyuses aBSD 2-clause license.

Tesseract usesLeptonica libraryfor opening input images (e.g. not documents like pdf).It is suggested to use leptonica with built-in support forzlib,png andtiff (for multipage tiff).

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

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