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