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Tesseract OCR

Reads text out of images and scans, in more than 100 languages.

What it does

Tesseract is an OCR engine. OCR, optical character recognition, turns pictures of text, such as photos or scanned pages, into text you can copy and search.

It recognises more than 100 languages, reads common image formats like PNG, JPEG and TIFF, and can produce plain text, searchable PDFs and other formats. Newer versions use a neural network, a type of AI, to read whole lines of text.

It does not come with a visual app of its own; it runs as a command-line program. Many other apps build on it and add a friendly interface.

Who it's for

Anyone who needs to digitise printed text, and developers adding text recognition to their apps.

Can I use it without coding?

With some setup. Pre-built installers exist, but you use it by typing commands; separate third-party apps offer a visual interface. New to this? Start here.

Can I run it?

Cost
FreeNothing to pay or sign up for.
Privacy
Runs on your own device: your data stays with you
API key
Not needed

Try it

  1. Install Tesseract from a ready-made package for your system, as described in its installation guide.
Official download page

Using Claude Code, Cursor or another AI coding assistant? Paste the prompt and it will walk you through the setup.New to this?

Before you install

  • Only download from the official GitHub page or the official download page above. Copies with similar names exist for many popular projects.
  • License (Apache-2.0): Permissive: free to use, change and share, including for business.
  • More on staying safe

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