Verified project record

tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Tesseract is an open source OCR engine that converts images of text into machine-readable text using neural net (LSTM) line recognition and legacy character pattern matching. It supports over 100 languages and multiple output formats including plain text, PDF, invisible-text-only PDF, hOCR, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE.

Project overview

Project type: Document Processing
Use cases: Documents & Office
Deployment: Refer to project documentation
License: Apache-2.0

Best for

Developers and general users needing a command-line or library-based tool to run OCR locally on various image formats without requiring a paid service.

Key capabilities

A neural net (LSTM) based OCR engine focused on line recognition.
A legacy character pattern recognition engine compatible with Tesseract 3.
Recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box with Unicode (UTF-8) support.
Supports various output formats: plain text, hOCR (HTML), PDF, invisible-text-only PDF, TSV, ALTO and PAGE.
Allows users to train Tesseract to recognize other languages.
Provides libtesseract C and C++ APIs for developers to build their own applications.

Limitations and risks

The application does not include a GUI; interaction is limited to the command line or developer APIs.
OCR results may be poor without improving the quality of the input image before processing.

Getting started

Setup involves medium difficulty. Users install the application via a pre-built binary package or by compiling from source. After installation, download the required traineddata language files and run the command 'tesseract imagename outputbase' to perform OCR.

Evidence and sources

README: This package contains an **OCR engine** - `libtesseract` and a **command line program** - `tesseract`.
README: Basic **[command line usage](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.html)**: tesseract imagename outputbase [-l lang] [--oem ocrenginemode] [--psm pagesegmode]…
README: Tesseract 4 adds a new neural net (LSTM) based [OCR engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition) which is focused on line recognition, but also still suppo…
README: Tesseract has **unicode (UTF-8) support**, and can **recognize [more than 100 languages](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Data-Files-in-different-versions.html)** "out of t…
README: Major version 5 is the current stable version and started with release [5.0.0](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases/tag/5.0.0) on November 30, 2021.

Reviewed at: 2026-07-17T05:04:50Z