| name | Tesseract OCR |
| description | Extract text from images and scanned PDFs via the local Tesseract binary. |
| requires | {"bins":["tesseract"],"env":[]} |
Tesseract OCR
Local, offline OCR. Wraps the tesseract CLI. No API key, no upload.
Use when
- "Read the text in this screenshot / photo"
- Extracting text from scanned documents (PDF images)
- Processing receipts / handwritten notes (low confidence, but tries)
- Pre-processing an image before feeding text into
summarize / translate
Do not use when
- Digital PDFs with embedded text — use
pdf-extract (faster, exact)
- Handwriting-heavy or complex layouts — results will be poor
- You need bounding boxes or structured output — use a vision LLM
Tools
status — Tesseract version
languages — installed language packs (eng, spa, fra, ...)
ocr — image_path; optional lang (default eng), psm (page seg mode, default 3), oem (engine mode, default 3)
Language packs
Install on Debian/Ubuntu: apt install tesseract-ocr-spa (etc.). Check
installed with languages. Combine with +: lang: "eng+spa".
Common PSM values
| PSM | Meaning |
|---|
| 3 | Fully automatic (default) |
| 6 | Single uniform block of text |
| 7 | Single line |
| 11 | Sparse text — find as much as possible, no order |
| 13 | Raw line — single text line, no preprocessing |