aeondave/tesseract

Tesseract

OCR for when the flag is technically visible but insists on pretending it is art.

When to use Tesseract

Use Tesseract when you need to:

• extract text from screenshots, photos, scans, or UI captures
• OCR serial numbers, labels, or handwritten-ish block text after preprocessing
• turn image-only evidence into searchable text

Quick Start

# OCR to stdout
tesseract image.png stdout

# OCR to a text file prefix
tesseract image.png output

# Specify language and page segmentation mode
tesseract image.png stdout -l eng --psm 6

Practical Notes

• Clean input matters: crop, deskew, increase contrast, and remove noise before blaming OCR.
• --psm changes behavior a lot; single-line, sparse-text, and full-page inputs want different modes.
• Pair with exiftool for metadata and with image preprocessing outside the OCR step when results are poor.

Caveats

• Garbage in, garbage out; screenshots of tiny text and stylized fonts need preprocessing.
• Wrong language packs or segmentation modes can destroy otherwise easy reads.
• OCR output still needs human verification before you treat it as evidence.

Resources

No bundled scripts/, references/, or assets/. Use the official Tesseract docs for language packs, OCR engine modes, and advanced config files.