.png "Tesseract OCR"){kind=logo}
What is Tesseract?
Tesseract OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine is a free open-source software developed by Google. It is designed to recognize and extract text from images or scanned documents. Tesseract was initially developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in the 1980s and later released as open source in 2005. Google took over the project in 2006 and has been actively maintaining and improving it since then.
Tesseract has undergone significant improvements over the years and is known for its high accuracy in recognizing printed text. However, its performance may vary depending on the quality of the input image, the complexity of the text, and the language being used.
The Tesseract OCR engine is a powerful tool for extracting text from images and documents. It has gained popularity due to its accuracy, language support, and active development community. However, it's important to note that while Tesseract performs well on printed text, it may not be as effective in recognizing handwriting or text with complex layouts.
Tesseract is an open-source project, which means that its source code is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. The project has a dedicated community of developers who actively contribute to its development, bug fixes, and feature enhancements.
Tesseract Installation and Language Support
Is Tesseract included with Software Companions products?
Yes. The latest 64-bit installations of ViewCompanion Premium, scViewerX, and scConverter now include the Tesseract OCR engine.
A separate Tesseract installation is no longer required when using the latest 64-bit versions of these products. Tesseract is installed automatically, and OCR functionality is available without additional configuration.
For scConverter, Tesseract is included in both the 64-bit SDK installation and the 64-bit redistributable package.
Installing Tesseract Separately
If you are using an older version of our software or a 32-bit edition that requires a separate Tesseract installation, you can download a Windows installer from:
Alternatively, you can download the following 64-bit installer from our website:
We recommend using the default installation folder suggested by the installer to ensure that our applications can locate Tesseract automatically.
Adding Support for Additional OCR Languages
The Tesseract installation included with our products contains English language data only.
Additional language files can be downloaded from the official Tesseract repository:
Download Tesseract Language Files on GitHub
To install an additional language, download the corresponding .traineddata file and copy it into the tessdata folder inside your product's Tesseract directory.
The default locations are:
ViewCompanion PremiumC:\Program Files\Software Companions\ViewCompanion Premium\Tesseract\tessdata
scViewerX
C:\Program Files\Software Companions\scViewerX\Tesseract\tessdata
scConverter
C:\Program Files\Software Companions\scConverter\Tesseract\tessdata
For example, to add German language support, download deu.traineddata and copy it into the tessdata folder.
Once installed, the additional language can be selected for OCR processing.
Common language codes include:
| Language | Code | File to Download |
|---|---|---|
| Danish | dan | dan.traineddata |
| English | eng | eng.traineddata |
| Finnish | fin | fin.traineddata |
| French | fra | fra.traineddata |
| German | deu | deu.traineddata |
| Italian | ita | ita.traineddata |
| Norwegian | nor | nor.traineddata |
| Spanish | spa | spa.traineddata |
| Swedish | swe | swe.traineddata |
Some Software Companions products also support selecting multiple OCR languages simultaneously. For example, eng+deu enables recognition of both English and German text.
For developers: When distributing applications that use scConverter or scViewerX, make sure that any additional OCR language files are included in the tessdata folder of the deployed Tesseract installation.
More About Tesseract
You will find more information about Tesseract here: