Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source engine for recognizing text in images. It accepts image inputs, including PNG, JPEG, and TIFF, and can create searchable PDFs. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android. Tesseract 4 introduced an LSTM-based neural OCR engine focused on line recognition, while Legacy OCR Engine mode provides compatibility with Tesseract 3. The repository code is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Developers can build applications with the libtesseract C or C++ API, and wrapper documentation describes bindings for other programming languages. The project identifies major version 5 as its current stable version. Tesseract uses Leptonica to open input images, and improving image quality may help produce better recognition results. It does not support handwriting OCR. HP open sourced the project in 2005, and Google developed it from 2006 to August 2017. Stefan Weil is identified as its current lead developer.
Who it is for
Tesseract suits developers building image text recognition into applications, and users who need searchable PDFs from image files. It does not support handwriting OCR.
What is good
- Free and licensed under Apache License 2.0.
- Accepts PNG, JPEG, and TIFF images.
- Can produce searchable PDFs.
- Provides C and C++ APIs and language bindings.
- Runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android.
What to know first
- Handwriting OCR is not supported.
- Recognition results may depend on input image quality.
- Leptonica is used to open input images.
Verdict
Tesseract OCR is a free image-based text recognition engine with developer APIs and searchable PDF output. Image quality can affect results, and handwriting recognition is not supported.
Compared on OCR software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Searchable PDF
- Yes
- Handwriting OCR
- No
- Primary platform
- desktop
- Supported inputs
- image
