Installing additional language packs¶

OCRmyPDF uses Tesseract for OCR, and relies on its language packs for all languages. On most platforms, English is installed with Tesseract by default, but not always.

Tesseract supports most languages. Languages are identified by standardized three-letter codes (called ISO 639-2 Alpha-3). Tesseract’s documentation also lists the three-letter code for your language. Some are anglicized, e.g. Spanish is spa rather than esp, while others are not, e.g. German is deu and French is fra.

After you have installed a language pack, you can use it with ocrmypdf -l <language>, for example ocrmypdf -l spa. For multilingual documents, you can specify all languages to be expected, e.g. ocrmypdf -l eng+fra for English and French. English is assumed by default unless other language(s) are specified.

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

# 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.