Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source PDF tool for Windows, macOS and Linux. Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository). It has 76,855 GitHub stars and is released under the Apache-2.0 license, and people use it instead of ABBYY FineReader.
- Official
- Linux
- macOS
- Windows
- PDF editors & tools
- Actively maintained
About Tesseract OCR
This package contains an OCR engine - libtesseract and a command line program - tesseract. Tesseract 4 adds a new neural net (LSTM) based OCR engine 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 files which support the legacy engine, for example those from the tessdata repository.
Replaces
Commercial software people commonly use Tesseract OCR instead of.
- ABBYY FineReader
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What is Tesseract OCR?
Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source PDF tool for Windows, macOS and Linux. Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository). It has 76,855 GitHub stars and is released under the Apache-2.0 license, and people use it instead of ABBYY FineReader.
Is Tesseract OCR free and open source?
Yes. Tesseract OCR's source code is public on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license, which is OSI-approved or FSF-free, so you can use, copy and change it for free.
How do I install Tesseract OCR?
Download the installer for Windows, macOS and Linux from its GitHub Releases page (latest: 5.5.3) or the project website.
Can Tesseract OCR replace ABBYY FineReader?
Tesseract OCR is commonly used as a free alternative to ABBYY FineReader. Features differ, so check that it opens the file formats and covers the workflows you rely on before switching.