# Tesseract OCR

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## 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](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Data-Files.html) files which support the legacy engine, for example
those from the tessdata repository.

The lead developer is Ray Smith. The maintainer is Zdenko Podobny.
For a list of contributors see [AUTHORS](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/AUTHORS)
and GitHub's log of [contributors](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/graphs/contributors).

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

Tesseract supports **various output formats**: plain text, hOCR (HTML), PDF, invisible-text-only PDF, TSV. The master branch also has experimental support for ALTO (XML) output.

You should note that in many cases, in order to get better OCR results,
you'll need to **[improve the quality](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/ImproveQuality.html) of the image** you are giving Tesseract.

This project **does not include a GUI application**.
If you need one, please see the [3rdParty](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/User-Projects-%E2%80%93-3rdParty.html) documentation.

Tesseract **can be trained to recognize other languages**.
See [Tesseract Training](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Training-Tesseract.html) for more information.

## Brief history

Tesseract was originally developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol and
at Hewlett-Packard Co, Greeley Colorado 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. Since 2006 it is developed by Google.

The latest (LSTM based) stable version is **[4.1.1](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases/tag/4.1.1)**, released on December 26, 2019.
Latest source code is available from [master branch on GitHub](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/tree/master).
Open issues can be found in [issue tracker](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/issues),
and [planning documentation](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Planning.html).

The latest 3.0x version is **[3.05.02](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases/tag/3.05.02)**, released on June 19, 2018. Latest source code for 3.05 is available from [3.05 branch on GitHub](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/tree/3.05).
There is no development for this version, but it can be used for special cases (e.g. see [Regression of features from 3.0x](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Planning.html#regression-of-features-from-30x)).

See **[Release Notes](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/ReleaseNotes.html)**
and **[Change Log](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/ChangeLog)** for more details of the releases.

## Installing Tesseract

You can either [Install Tesseract via pre-built binary package](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Home.html)
or [build it from source](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Compiling.html).

C++17 support is required for building.

## Running Tesseract

Basic **[command line usage](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.html)**:

    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](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.html#simplest-invocation-to-ocr-an-image).

## For developers

Developers can use `libtesseract` [C](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/include/tesseract/capi.h) or
[C++](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/include/tesseract/baseapi.h) API to build their own application.
If you need bindings to `libtesseract` for other programming languages, please see the
[wrapper](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/AddOns.html#tesseract-wrappers) section in the AddOns documentation.

Documentation of Tesseract generated from source code by doxygen can be found on [tesseract-ocr.github.io](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/).

## Support

Before you submit an issue, please review **[the guidelines for this repository](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)**.

For support, first read the [documentation](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/),
particularly the [FAQ](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/FAQ.html) to see if your problem is addressed there.
If not, search the [Tesseract user forum](https://groups.google.com/g/tesseract-ocr), the [Tesseract developer forum](https://groups.google.com/g/tesseract-dev) and [past issues](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/issues), and if you still can't find what you need, ask for support in the mailing-lists.

Mailing-lists:
* [tesseract-ocr](https://groups.google.com/g/tesseract-ocr) - For tesseract users.
* [tesseract-dev](https://groups.google.com/g/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](http://leptonica.com/) which essentially
uses a [BSD 2-clause license](http://leptonica.com/about-the-license.html).

## Dependencies

Tesseract uses [Leptonica library](https://github.com/DanBloomberg/leptonica)
for opening input images (e.g. not documents like pdf).
It is suggested to use leptonica with built-in support for [zlib](https://zlib.net),
[png](https://sourceforge.net/projects/libpng) and
[tiff](http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff) (for multipage tiff).

## Latest Version of README

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

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