AeonDave 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.
--psmchanges behavior a lot; single-line, sparse-text, and full-page inputs want different modes.- Pair with
exiftoolfor 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.