Installing additional language packs

OCRmyPDF uses Tesseract for OCR, and relies on its language packs for languages other than English.

Tesseract supports most languages.

For Linux users, you can often find packages that provide language packs:

Debian and Ubuntu users

# Display a list of all Tesseract language packs
apt-cache search tesseract-ocr

# Install Chinese Simplified language pack
apt-get install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim

You can then pass the -l LANG argument to OCRmyPDF to give a hint as to what languages it should search for. Multiple languages can be requested using either -l eng+fre (English and French) or -l eng -l fre.

Fedora users

# Display a list of all Tesseract language packs
dnf search tesseract

# Install Chinese Simplified language pack
dnf install tesseract-langpack-chi_sim

You can then pass the -l LANG argument to OCRmyPDF to give a hint as to what languages it should search for. Multiple languages can be requested using either -l eng+fre (English and French) or -l eng -l fre.

macOS users

You can install additional language packs by installing Tesseract using Homebrew with all language packs.

Docker users

Users of the OCRmyPDF Docker image should install language packs into a derived Docker image as described in that section.