tesseract

name	tesseract
description	Optical character recognition (OCR) via the Tesseract CLI. Use for extracting text from images, scanned documents, PDFs, screenshots, and photos of text.
metadata	{"version":"1.0.0","displayName":"Tesseract OCR","author":"gremlin","category":"data","icon":"scan","tags":["ocr","text-extraction","image","document","scan"],"install":"which tesseract || (apt-get update && apt-get install -y tesseract-ocr)\n","allowedCommands":["tesseract"]}

Tesseract OCR

You have access to tesseract for extracting text from images.

Safety

• OCR output may contain errors — always inform the user that results should be reviewed for accuracy.
• For sensitive documents, note that the text is being extracted locally with no external API calls.

Tips

• Basic usage: tesseract input.png output produces output.txt.
• Output to stdout: tesseract input.png stdout
• Specify language: tesseract input.png stdout -l eng (or deu, fra, spa, chi_sim, etc.)
• Multiple languages: tesseract input.png stdout -l eng+fra
• List installed languages: tesseract --list-langs
• Install additional languages: apt-get install tesseract-ocr-<lang> (e.g., tesseract-ocr-deu)
• Output formats: tesseract input.png output pdf for searchable PDF, tesseract input.png output hocr for HTML with coordinates.
• Page segmentation modes (--psm):
  • 3 = fully automatic (default)
  • 6 = assume uniform block of text
  • 7 = single line
  • 8 = single word
  • 13 = raw line, no OSD
• For best results, preprocess images first: increase contrast, deskew, and threshold to black/white using ImageMagick.
• Example preprocessing: magick input.jpg -colorspace gray -threshold 50% clean.png && tesseract clean.png stdout
• For multi-page PDFs, convert pages to images first with ImageMagick or pdftoppm, then OCR each page.