# Tesseract OCR (open-source PDF tool)

> 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.

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.

## Key facts

| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Repository | https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract |
| Platforms | Linux, macOS, Windows |
| Interface | desktop GUI |
| GitHub stars | 76,855 |
| License | Apache-2.0 (open source) |
| Replaces | ABBYY FineReader |
| Language | C++ |
| Website | https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/ |
| Official | yes (published by the project behind the app) |
| Category | PDF editors & tools |
| Latest release | 5.5.3 (Jul 24, 2026) |
| Last commit | Oct 7, 2026 |

## Install

Download a build for your system from the project's releases (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases) or website, or build it from source by following the README.

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