A console/terminal demo of OCR with Tesseract via pytesseract, for Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux 24.04. It recognizes the text in an image, prints it, and saves it to model/ocr/output.txt. Windows uses the bundled Tesseract 4.00 (in bin/Tesseract-OCR, with 106 language packs including English and Chinese) out of the box; Ubuntu uses the system Tesseract. It runs fully offline after setup and needs no GPU.

 

[Prerequisites]

  • Operating system: Windows 11 or Ubuntu Linux 24.04.
  • Python 3 and pip.
  • Windows needs no separate Tesseract install, because it is bundled; on Ubuntu, install it first with sudo apt install tesseract-ocr.
  • No GPU required; an ordinary CPU is enough.

[Instructions]

Step 1: Create the virtual environment

Create the venv and install the requirements (pytesseract and Pillow).

 

Windows: src\01_venv_create.bat

Linux: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

Linux: bash src/01_venv_create.sh

Step 2: Activate the virtual environment

Activate the venv. On Linux, source the script.

 

Windows: src\02_venv_activate.bat

Linux: source src/02_venv_activate.sh

Step 3: Run the OCR

Recognize the text in the image. Any extra arguments are forwarded to the program.

 

Windows: src\03_ocr.bat

Linux: bash src/03_ocr.sh

Step 4: Remove the virtual environment

Delete the venv/ folder.

 

Windows: src\99_venv_clear.bat

Linux: bash src/99_venv_clear.sh

[Python Entry Point]

  • src/ocr.py: [--image data/input.png] [--lang eng] [--tesseract PATH] [--output model/ocr/output.txt] [--show]. --lang takes language codes such as eng or chi_tra, and several languages can be combined with a plus sign, for example eng+chi_tra.

[Usage Notes]

  • The bundled Windows Tesseract ships all 106 language packs; on Ubuntu, install extra languages with sudo apt install tesseract-ocr-{lang}, for example tesseract-ocr-chi-tra for traditional Chinese.
  • bin/tesseract-ocr-setup-4.00.00dev.exe is the original Windows installer and is not needed to run the demo, because the extracted bin/Tesseract-OCR is used directly.

[References]

 

This SDK is built in AppForAI - AI Dev Tools.

 

Purchase license separately:  USD 600, permanent authorization, single APP authorization, single machine authorization, one-year activation, one-year download, one-year update, one-year email technical support.