tesseract/INSTALL.GIT.md

autotools (LINUX/UNIX , msys...)

If you have cloned Tesseract from GitHub, you must generate the configure script.

If you have tesseract 4.0x installation in your system, please remove it before new build.

You need Leptonica 1.74.2 (minimum) for Tesseract 4.0x.

Known dependencies for training tools (excluding leptonica):

• compiler with c++11 support
• automake
• pkg-config
• pango-devel
• cairo-devel
• icu-devel

So, the steps for making Tesseract are:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig
$ make training
$ sudo make training-install

You need to install at least English language and OSD traineddata files to TESSDATA_PREFIX directory.

You can retrieve single file with tools like wget, curl, GithubDownloader or browser.

All language data files can be retrieved from git repository (useful only for packagers!). (Repository is huge - more that 1.2 GB. You do NOT need to download traineddata files for all languages).

$ git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata.git tesseract-ocr.tessdata

You need an Internet connection to compile ScrollView.jar because the build will automatically download piccolo2d-core-3.0.jar and piccolo2d-extras-3.0.jar and place them to tesseract/java.

Just run:

$ make ScrollView.jar

and follow the instruction on Viewer Debugging wiki.

CMAKE

There is alternative build system based on multiplatform cmake

LINUX

$ mkdir build
$ cd build && cmake .. && make
$ sudo make install

WINDOWS

You need to use leptonica with cmake patch:

git clone https://github.com/DanBloomberg/leptonica.git
cd leptonica
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
cd ..\..
git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git
cd tesseract
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DLeptonica_BUILD_DIR=\abs\path\to\leptonica\build
cmake --build .

WINDOWS Visual Studio

Please read http://vorba.ch/2014/tesseract-3.03-vs2013.html