tesseract/doc/tesseract.1.asc

TESSERACT(1)
============

NAME
----
tesseract - command-line OCR engine

SYNOPSIS
--------
*tesseract* 'imagename' 'textbase' ['configfile'] ['-l lang']

DESCRIPTION
-----------
tesseract(1) is a commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP
between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by 
UNLV. It was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005, and has been developed
by Google since then.


OPTIONS
-------
'imagename'
	The name of the input image

'textbase'
	The basename of the output file (to which the appropriate extension
	will be appended)

'configfile'
	The config to use. A config is a plaintext file which contains a list
	of variables and their values, one per line, with a space separating
	variable from value.

'-l lang'
	The language to use. If none is specified, English is assumed.
	Tesseract uses 3-character ISO 639-2 language codes. (See LANGUAGES)

'-v'
	Returns the current version of the tesseract(1) executable.

LANGUAGES
---------

There are currently language packs available for the following languages:

[width="40%",options="header"]
|=============================
|Code     |Name
|bul      |Bulgarian
|cat      |Catalan
|ces      |Czech
|chi_sim  |Simplified Chinese
|chi_tra  |Traditional Chinese
|dan      |Danish
|dan-frak |Danish (Fraktur)
|deu      |German
|ell      |Greek
|eng      |English
|fin      |Finnish
|fra      |French
|hun      |Hungarian
|ind      |Indonesian
|ita      |Italian
|jpn      |Japanese
|kor      |Korean
|lav      |Latvian
|lit      |Lithuanian
|nld      |Dutch
|nor      |Norwegian
|pol      |Polish
|por      |Portuguese
|ron      |Romanian
|rus      |Russian
|slk      |Slovakian
|slv      |Slovenian
|spa      |Spanish
|srp      |Serbian
|swe      |Swedish
|tgl      |Tagalog
|tha      |Thai
|tur      |Turkish
|ukr      |Ukrainian
|vie      |Vietnamese
|=============================

HISTORY
-------
The engine was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories Bristol and at 
Hewlett Packard Co, Greeley Colorado between 1985 and 1994, with some more 
changes made in 1996 to port to Windows, and some C\+\+izing in 1998. A 
lot of the code was written in C, and then some more was written in C\+\+. 
Since then all the code has been converted to at least compile with a 
C\++ compiler. Currently it builds under Linux with gcc4.0, gcc4.1 and 
under Windows with VC\+\+6 and VC\+\+Express. The C\++ code makes heavy use of 
a list system using macros. This predates stl, was portable before stl, and 
is more efficient than stl lists, but has the big negative that if you do get 
a segmentation violation, it is hard to debug. Another "feature" of the 
C/C\++ split is that the C\++ data structures get converted to C data 
structures to call the low-level C code. This is ugly, and the C++izing of 
the C code is a step towards eliminating the conversion, but it has not 
happened yet.

The most important changes in version 2.00 were that Tesseract can now 
recognize 6 languages, is fully UTF8 capable, and is fully trainable. See 
<http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/TrainingTesseract> for more 
information on training.

Tesseract was included in UNLV's Fourth Annual Test of OCR Accuracy. 
See <http://www.isri.unlv.edu/downloads/AT-1995.pdf>. With Tesseract 2.00, 
scripts are now included to allow anyone to reproduce some of these tests. 
See <http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/TestingTesseract> for more 
details.

Tesseract 3.00 adds a number of new languages, including Chinese, Japanese, 
and Korean. It also introduces a new, single-file based system of managing 
language data. For further details, see the file ReleaseNotes included with 
the distribution.

SEE ALSO
--------
tesseract(1)

COPYING
-------
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0