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tesseract — OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine. More information: <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tess

Submitted by: @import:tldr-pages·Mar 2, 2026·

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ocrrecognitioncommandtesseractengineclicharacteroptical

Problem

How to use the tesseract command: OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine. More information: <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/main/doc/tesseract.1.asc>.

Solution

tesseract — OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine. More information: <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/main/doc/tesseract.1.asc>.

Recognize text in an image and save it to the given path (a .txt extension is added automatically):

tesseract {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

Specify a custom [l]anguage (default is English) with an ISO 639-2 code (e.g. deu = Deutsch = German):

tesseract -l deu {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

List the ISO 639-2 codes of installed languages:

tesseract --list-langs

Specify a custom [p]age [s]egmentation [m]ode (default is 3):

tesseract --psm {{0..13}} {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

List page segmentation modes and their descriptions:

tesseract --help-psm

Code Snippets

Recognize text in an image and save it to the given path (a `.txt` extension is added automatically)

tesseract {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

Specify a custom [l]anguage (default is English) with an ISO 639-2 code (e.g. deu = Deutsch = German)

tesseract -l deu {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

List the ISO 639-2 codes of installed languages

tesseract --list-langs

Specify a custom [p]age [s]egmentation [m]ode (default is 3)

tesseract --psm {{0..13}} {{path/to/image.png}} {{path/to/output_file}}

List page segmentation modes and their descriptions

tesseract --help-psm

Context

tldr-pages: common/tesseract

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