Using the tesseract CLI tool

Author: simonw

tesseract/tesseract-cli.md

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+# Using the tesseract CLI tool
+
+Tesseract OCR has a command-line utility which is woefully under-documented. Thanks to [Alexandru Nedelcu](https://alexn.org/blog/2020/11/11/organize-index-screenshots-ocr-macos.html) I figured out how to use it today.
+
+To install on macOS:
+
+    brew install tesseract
+
+To convert an image into an annotated PDF (which you can then copy and paste text out of, and which will be correctly indexed by Spotlight):
+
+    tesseract image.png output-file -l eng pdf
+    
+The second `output-file` argument there is the path and filename of the output - note that I didn't include a `.pdf` extension because Tesseract adds that automatically - so the output will be in a file called `output-file.pdf`.
+
+To get out just the plain text:
+
+    tesseract image.png output-file -l eng txt