OCRFeeder vs Tesseract OCR

OCRFeeder is a Linux system for analyzing document layouts and recognizing text in images. It automatically outlines image content, separates graphics from text, and applies OCR to text regions. Its GTK graphical interface lets users correct recognition errors and bounding boxes, set paragraph styles, and clean input images. Users can import PDFs and save or load projects. The application exports to multiple formats, with ODT as its main format, and provides both a graphical interface and a command-line interface. It works with system-wide OCR engines, including command-line OCR engines. Documentation for the graphical interface is available from its Help menu or with F1. OCRFeeder is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or any later version chosen by the user. The GNOME project page links to source code and release packages, and the project page links to a GitLab issue tracker. Its listed roadmap includes proposed additions such as plain-text export and undo/redo support. The README states that the software is provided without warranty.

Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. It accepts image inputs including PNG, JPEG, and TIFF, and can output plain text, hOCR, PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE formats. PDF options include searchable PDFs and invisible-text-only PDFs. Tesseract 4 and later include an LSTM-based engine focused on line recognition, while Legacy OCR Engine mode retains compatibility with Tesseract 3. The project says it recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box; language data is installed separately from the engine. Developers can build applications with the C or C++ libtesseract API, and the documentation lists wrappers for other languages. The repository code uses the Apache License 2.0. Tesseract does not include a graphical user interface and points users to third-party interfaces. It uses Leptonica to open images, and improving input image quality may be needed for better recognition results. Installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, and Windows, with listed platforms also including Android and self-hosting.