Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has come a long way and is now accessible to developers at all skill levels, thanks to tools like pytesseract. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a simple, yet powerful, OCR application in Python using the tkinter library for the user interface and pytesseract for OCR functionality.
1. Setting Up the Environment
To build this app, you’ll need to install a few dependencies.
Step 1: Install the Required Python Libraries
You can install pytesseract and Pillow (Python Imaging Library, or PIL) using pip:
pip install pytesseract pillow
Step 2: Install Tesseract-OCR Engine
pytesseract is a wrapper for the Tesseract OCR engine, so you’ll need to install Tesseract itself.
brew install tesseract
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
Once Tesseract is installed, you may need to specify its path in your code, especially on Windows.