Research Guides: Tesseract OCR Software Tutorial: Home

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Welcome

Tesseract is an open source optical character recognition (OCR) platform. OCR extracts text from images and documents without a text layer and outputs the document into a new searchable text file, PDF, or most other popular formats. Tesseract is highly customizable and can operate using most languages, including multilingual documents and vertical text. Although the software can be used on Windows or Linux, this guide will be based on Mac operating systems which is done through the terminal application.

The goals of this guide are to learn how to:

Download and install Tesseract OCR and a package of other useful tools
Convert images from PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, into TIFFs
Improve image quality which in turn improves the quality of Tesseract's output
Easily use Tesseract
Make a whitelist (list of characters permitted)
Batch convert (convert many files at once)