Add more languages
This page will explain to you how to install language packages to support Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on more languages.
Last updated
This page will explain to you how to install language packages to support Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on more languages.
Last updated
Datashare is an open source project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
To be able to perform OCR, Datashare uses an open source technology called Apache Tesseract. When Tesseract extracts text from images, it uses "language packages" especially trained for each specific languages. Unfortunately, those packages can be heavy and to ensure a lightweight installation of Datashare, the installer doesn't use them all by default. In the case Datashare informs you of a missing package, this guide will explain you how to manually install it on your system.
To add ocr languages on linux, simply use the following command:
Where `[lang]` is can be :
all if you want to install all languages
a language code (ex: fra, for French), the list of languages is available here
The Datashare Installer for Mac checks for the existence of either MacPorts or Homebrew, which packages managers are used for the installation of Tesseract. If none of those two package managers is present, the Datashare Installer will install MacPorts by default.
First, you must check that MacPort is installed on your computer. Please run in a Terminal:
You should see an output similar to this:
If you get a command not found: port, this either means you are using Homebrew (see next section) or you did not run the Datashare installer for Mac yet.
If MacPort is installed on your computer, you should be able to add the missing Tesseract language package with the following command (for German):
The full list of supported language packages can be found on MacPorts website.
Once the installation is done, simply close and restart Datashare to be able to use the newly installed packages.
If Homebrew was already present on your system when Datashare was installed, Datashare used it to install Tesseract and its language packages. Because Homebrew doesn't package each Tesseract language individually, all languages are already supported by your system. In other words, you have nothing to do!
If you want to check if Homebrew is installed, run the following command in a Terminal:
You should see an output similar to this:
If you get a command not found: brew error, this mean Homebrew is not installed on your system. You might either use MacPorts (see previous section) or run the Datashare installer for Mac on your computer.
Languages packages are available on Tesseract Github repository. Trained data files have to be downloaded and added into tessdata folder in Tesseract's installation folder.
*Additionnal languages can be also added during Tesseract's installation.
The list of installed languages can be checked with Windows command prompt or Powershell with the commandtesseract --list-langs.
Datashare has to be restarted after the language installation.
