Tesseract_FFI

Welcome to Tesseract_FFI! This is a ruby wrapper to the Tesseract library. Before installing this gem, make sure that Tesseract runs. For example, run the command

$ tesseract --version

and under Linux, etc you should see something like

tesseract 4.1.1-rc2-25-g9707
 leptonica-1.78.0
  libgif 5.1.4 : libjpeg 8d (libjpeg-turbo 1.4.2) : libpng 1.2.54 : libtiff 4.0.6 : zlib 1.2.8 : libwebp 0.4.4 : libopenjp2 2.3.0
 Found AVX2
 Found AVX
 Found FMA
 Found SSE
 Found libarchive 3.1.2

Don't know about Windows, apart from the Windows Subsystem for Linux works really well! This also need Imagemagick to be installed (used for splitting pdfs).

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'tesseract_ffi'

And then execute:

    $ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

    $ gem install tesseract_ffi

The fastest way to get going is to use the high-level functions that will probably suit most people , most of the time.

require 'tesseract_ffi'

TesseractFFI.to_text('my_image.png')

require 'tesseract_ffi'
TesseractFFI.to_pdf('my_image.png', 'output_file')

When the default 'recognition of English' is not suitable, you can change it. The abreviations used for some common European languages are

• deu - German
• eng - English
• fra - French
• ita - Italian
• nld - Dutch
• por - Portuguese
• spa - Spanish

but Tesseract itself supports many, many languages including but not limited to chi_sim (Chinese simplified), chi_tra (Chinese traditional), chr (Cherokee), cym (Welsh), frk (Frankish), frm (French, Middle, ca.1400-1600). Just ensure that you have the corresponding Tesseract language recognition libraries installed. The best way to confirm this is directly from the command line. For example, to ensure that French recognition files are available to tesseract, type this command to recognise a test image in French

tesseract imagename.png  mytext -l fra

To call from within a ruby file, the following snippet should work for an image in German:

require 'tesseract_ffi'

TesseractFFI.to_text('my_image.png', 'deu')

or by creating Ruby objects:

require 'tesseract_ffi'
tess = TesseractFFI::Tesseract.new(
      language:'fra', 
      file_name: 'test/images/bonjour.png')
tess.recognize
text = tess.utf8_text

Wikipedia says HOCR 'is an open standard of data representation for formatted text obtained from optical character recognition (OCR)'. Tesseract can produce it and generate the bounding boxes of the words, the lines, the paragraphs on a page.

require 'tesseract_ffi'
tess = TesseractFFI::Tesseract.new( 
      file_name: 'test/images/4words.png', 
      source_resolution:96)
tess.recognize
text = tess.hocr_text

<div class='ocr_page' id='page_18' title='image ""; bbox 0 0 341 17; ppageno 17'>
   <div class='ocr_carea' id='block_18_1' title="bbox 0 0 341 17">
    <p class='ocr_par' id='par_18_1' lang='eng' title="bbox 0 0 341 17">
     <span class='ocr_line' id='line_18_1' title="bbox 0 0 341 17; baseline -0.012 -1; x_size 16; x_descenders 4; x_ascenders 4">
      <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_18_1' title='bbox 0 4 49 17; x_wconf 92'>Name</span>
      <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_18_2' title='bbox 54 4 94 17; x_wconf 90'>Arial</span>
      <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_18_3' title='bbox 237 0 296 15; x_wconf 90'>Century</span>
      <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_18_4' title='bbox 302 0 341 12; x_wconf 90'>Peter</span>
     </span>
    </p>
   </div>
  </div>

require 'tesseract_ffi'
tess = TesseractFFI::Tesseract.new( 
      file_name: 'test/images/4words.png')

# tess.recognize_rectangle(x,y,w,h)
tess.recognize_rectangle(300, 0, 41, 15)
text = tess.utf8_text
# => "Peter"

Create a TesseractFFI::Tesseract object specifying the image file, the language(s) and, optionally the source resolution (dpi of the image) and the OCR Engine Mode, OEM. The default is to use the latest mode, which uses a neural network for the recognition. For some purposes, such as typeface/font recognition, it can be desirable to use the legacy mode even though the recognition is not usually as good.

require 'tesseract_ffi'
tess = TesseractFFI::Tesseract.new( 
      file_name: 'test/images/4words.png', 
      source_resolution:96)

Then call Tesseract.setup with the desired methods in a block.

tess.setup do
  tess.set_rectangle(300, 0, 40, 20)
  tess.ocr
  puts tess.utf8_text
  # => Peter
  tess.set_rectangle(0, 0, 340, 17)
  tess.ocr
  puts tess.utf8_text
  # => Name Arial Century Peter
end

If you look under the hood, there are intermediate ruby methods that do most things, and some very low level functions that make calls to the C-API of Tesseract using the wonderful FFI library. The low level functions give alarming error messages and often stack dump if called in the wrong order, so they are not for the feint of heart. But if your screen allows to scroll back 1000 lines, you can usually see where the call to Tesseract went wrong. This gem aims to hide the complexity of the direct calls to the C library. The examples directory includes a couple of files that show the way to proceed at the different levels of complexity and the tests show more usage.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bundle exec rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/dverrier/tesseract_ffi. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Tesseract_FFI project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.