tesseract

# Tesseract OCR

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## Table of Contents

* [Tesseract OCR](#tesseract-ocr)
  * [About](#about)
  * [Brief history](#brief-history)
  * [Installing Tesseract](#installing-tesseract)
  * [Running Tesseract](#running-tesseract)
  * [For developers](#for-developers)
  * [Support](#support)
  * [License](#license)
  * [Dependencies](#dependencies)
  * [Latest Version of README](#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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition) 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](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/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](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/main/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](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Data-Files-in-different-versions.html)** "out of the box".

Tesseract supports **[various image formats](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/InputFormats)** 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](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.