These are the instructions for installing Tesseract from the git repository. You should be ready to face unexpected problems.
In order to do this; you must have automake, libtool, leptonica, make and pkg-config installed. In addition, you need Git and a C++ compiler.
On Debian or Ubuntu, you can probably install all required packages like this:
apt-get install automake ca-certificates g++ git libtool libleptonica-dev make pkg-config
The optional manpages are built with asciidoc:
apt-get install --no-install-recommends asciidoc docbook-xsl xsltproc
If you want to build the Tesseract training tools as well, you'll also require Pango:
apt-get install libpango1.0-dev
Afterwards, to clone the master branch to your computer, do this:
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git
or to make a shallow clone with commit history truncated to the latest commit only:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git
or to clone a different branch/version:
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git --branch <branchName> --single-branch
Note: You may have problems with building the latest version on GitHub. If this is the case, download one of the latest released versions instead, from here: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases.
Note: Tesseract requires Leptonica v1.74 or newer. If your system has only older versions of Leptonica, you must compile it manually from source available at DanBloomberg/leptonica.
Finally, run these:
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
Then, set a local variable called TESSDATA_PREFIX
to point to the tesseract tessdata
directory, and also place file eng.traineddata
into it (or whatever other language(s) you need) from here: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata. See section "Post-Install Instructions" below.
If you get this error:
make all-recursive
Making all in ccstruct
/bin/sh ../libtool --tag=CXX --mode=compile g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -
I.. -I../ccutil -I../cutil -I../image -I../viewer -I/opt/local/
include -I/usr/local/include/leptonica -g -O2 -MT blobbox.lo -MD -MP -
MF .deps/blobbox.Tpo -c -o blobbox.lo blobbox.cpp
mv -f .deps/blobbox.Tpo .deps/blobbox.Plo
mv: rename .deps/blobbox.Tpo to .deps/blobbox.Plo: No such file or
directory
make[3]: *** [blobbox.lo] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
Try to run autoreconf -i
after running ./autogen.sh
.
Once installation is complete, don't forget to do the following!:
-
Set a local variable called
TESSDATA_PREFIX
to point to the tesseracttessdata
directory.-
Ex: on Linux Ubuntu, modify your
~/.bashrc
file by adding the following to the bottom of it. Modify the path according to your situation:export TESSDATA_PREFIX="/home/$USER/Downloads/tesseract/tesseract-4.1.0/tessdata"
-
Then, close and re-open your terminal for it to take effect, or just call
. ~/.bashrc
orexport ~/.bashrc
(same thing) for it to take effect immediately in your current terminal.
-
-
Place any language training data you need into this
tessdata
folder as well. For example, the English one is calledeng.traineddata
. Download it from the tessdata repository here, and move it to yourtessdata
directory you just specified in yourTESSDATA_PREFIX
variable above.- Here is the direct download link for eng.traineddata.
-
Now you are ready to use
tesseract
!
The above does not build the Tesseract training tools. If you plan to install the training tools, you also need the following libraries:
sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
sudo apt-get install libpango1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev
To build Tesseract with training tools, run the following:
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
make training
sudo make training-install
You can specify extra options for configure, as needed. eg.
./configure --disable-openmp --disable-debug --disable-opencl --disable-graphics --disable-shared 'CXXFLAGS=-g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic'
Building with TensorFlow requires additional packages for Protocol Buffers and TensorFlow. On Debian or Ubuntu, you can probably install them like this:
apt-get install libprotoc-dev libtensorflow-dev
All builds will automatically build Tesseract and the training tools with TensorFlow if the necessary development files are found. This can be overridden:
# Enforce build with TensorFlow (will fail if requirements are not met).
./configure --with-tensorflow [...]
# Don't build with TensorFlow.
./configure --without-tensorflow [...]
Build support with TensorFlow is a new feature in Git master. The resulting code is still untested.
Such builds can be used to run the automated regression tests, which have additional requirements. This includes the additional dependencies for the training tools (as mentioned above), and downloading all git submodules, as well as the model repositories (*.traineddata
):
# Clone the Tesseract source tree:
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git
# Clone repositories with model files (from the same directory):
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata.git
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_best.git
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_fast.git
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/langdata_lstm.git
# Change to the Tesseract source tree and get all submodules:
cd tesseract
git submodule update --init
# Build the training tools (see above). Here we use a release built with sanitizers:
./autogen.sh
mkdir -p bin/unittest
cd bin/unittest
../../configure --disable-shared 'CXXFLAGS=-g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -fsanitize=address,undefined -fstack-protector-strong -ftrapv'
make training
# Run the unit tests:
make check
cd ../..
This will create log files for all unit tests, both individual and accumulated, under bin/unittest/unittest
. They can also be run standalone, for example
bin/unittest/unittest/stringrenderer_test
Failed tests will show prominently as segfaults or SIGILL handlers (depending on the platform).
Such builds produce Tesseract binaries which run very slowly. They are not useful for production, but good to find or analyze software problems. This is a proven build sequence:
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
mkdir -p bin/debug
cd bin/debug
../../configure --enable-debug --disable-shared 'CXXFLAGS=-g -O0 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -fsanitize=address,undefined -fstack-protector-strong -ftrapv'
# Build tesseract and training tools. Run `make` if you don't need the training tools.
make training
cd ../..
This activates debug code, does not use a shared Tesseract library (that makes it possible to run tesseract
without installation), disables compiler optimizations (allows better debugging with gdb
), enables lots of compiler warnings and enables several run time checks.
Such builds can be used to investigate performance problems. Tesseract will run slower than without profiling, but with acceptable speed. This is a proven build sequence:
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
mkdir -p bin/profiling
cd bin/profiling
../../configure --disable-shared 'CXXFLAGS=-g -p -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic'
# Build tesseract and training tools. Run `make` if you don't need the training tools.
make training
cd ../..
This does not use a shared Tesseract library (that makes it possible to run tesseract
without installation),
enables profiling code,
enables compiler optimizations and enables lots of compiler warnings.
Optionally this can also be used with debug code by adding --enable-debug
and replacing -O2
by -O0
.
The profiling code creates a file named gmon.out
in the current directory when Tesseract terminates.
GNU gprof is used to show the profiling information from that file.
The default build creates a Tesseract executable which is fine for processing of single images. Tesseract then uses 4 CPU cores to get an OCR result as fast as possible.
For mass production with hundreds or thousands of images that default is bad because the multi threaded execution has a very large overhead. It is better to run single threaded instances of Tesseract, so that every available CPU core will process a different image.
This is a proven build sequence:
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
mkdir -p bin/release
cd bin/release
../../configure --disable-openmp --disable-shared 'CXXFLAGS=-g -O2 -fno-math-errno -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic'
# Build tesseract and training tools. Run `make` if you don't need the training tools.
make training
cd ../..
This disabled OpenMP (multi threading), does not use a shared Tesseract library (that makes it possible to run tesseract
without installation), enables compiler optimizations,
disables setting of errno
for mathematical functions (faster execution!) and enables lots of compiler warnings.
Fuzzing is used to test the Tesseract API for bugs. Tesseract uses OSS-Fuzz, but fuzzing can also run locally. A newer Clang++ compiler is required.
Build example (fix the value of CXX for the available clang++):
cd tesseract
./autogen.sh
mkdir -p bin/fuzzer
cd bin/fuzzer
../../configure --disable-openmp --disable-shared CXX=clang++-7 CXXFLAGS='-g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG -fsanitize=fuzzer-no-link,address,undefined'
# Build the fuzzer executable.
make fuzzer-api
cd ../..
Example (Show help information):
bin/fuzzer/fuzzer-api -help=1
Example (Run the fuzzer with a known test case):
bin/fuzzer/fuzzer-api clusterfuzz-testcase-minimized-fuzzer-api-5670045835853824
Example (Run the fuzzer to find new bugs):
nice bin/fuzzer/fuzzer-api -jobs=16 -workers=16