Tesseract OCR - Newbie Questions!

Question

I just installed Tesseract OCR and was able to convert a TIF image to its corresponding text. The application seems fairly easy to use, but I am struggling finding the documentation that will help me make the most of it. So, here are a couple of questions I hope someone here can help me with:

1. I'm converting PDFs to TIFs using ImageMagick. What settings do I need to use when I make this conversion? Basically, what image settings would be optimal for OCR?

2. How do I use hOCR?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Honestly, I've never been able to find a command for ImageMagick that produces a TIF in the format that Tesseract prefers. My own solution was instead to have ImageMagick convert each PDF page to a PNG, build Tesseract with Leptonica and then run Tesseract against those images.

And to use hOCR, make a new text file with the following text in it: "tessedit_create_hocr 1". Save it somewhere and when you execute tesseract use:

tesseract [inputFile] [outputFile] [-l optionalLanguageFile] [PathTohOCRConfigFile]