Can't install Tesseract-OCR on Mac

Question

I'm trying to make an OCR program in python 2.7.14 with pytesseract. When I ran my code:

from PIL import Image
import pytesseract

print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test.png')))

I got the error:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'test.png'

I searched in many places, and it seems that I need to install tesseract-ocr. I ran:

pip install tesseract-ocr

But I got the error:

Collecting tesseract-ocr Using cached tesseract-ocr-0.0.1.tar.gz Requirement already satisfied: cython in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from tesseract-ocr) Installing collected packages: tesseract-ocr Running setup.py install for tesseract-ocr ... error Complete output from command /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;file='/private/var/folders/rd/lf95py7d7s3dkzft38jh3m8h0000gn/T/pip-build-DTR_fL/tesseract-ocr/setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(file);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, file, 'exec'))" install --record /var/folders/rd/lf95py7d7s3dkzft38jh3m8h0000gn/T/pip-U3OoHi-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile: running install running build running build_py file tesseract_ocr.py (for module tesseract_ocr) not found file tesseract_ocr.py (for module tesseract_ocr) not found running build_ext building 'tesseract_ocr' extension creating build creating build/temp.macosx-10.6-intel-2.7 /usr/bin/clang -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -dynamic -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/include/python2.7 -c tesseract_ocr.cpp -o build/temp.macosx-10.6-intel-2.7/tesseract_ocr.o tesseract_ocr.cpp:558:10: fatal error: 'leptonica/allheaders.h' file not found #include "leptonica/allheaders.h" ^ 1 error generated. error: command '/usr/bin/clang' failed with exit status 1

Command "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;file='/private/var/folders/rd/lf95py7d7s3dkzft38jh3m8h0000gn/T/pip-build-DTR_fL/tesseract-ocr/setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(file);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, file, 'exec'))" install --record /var/folders/rd/lf95py7d7s3dkzft38jh3m8h0000gn/T/pip-U3OoHi-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /private/var/folders/rd/lf95py7d7s3dkzft38jh3m8h0000gn/T/pip-build-DTR_fL/tesseract-ocr/

Is there anyway I can fix this? (This same error occurred when I tried other ways of installing it, like sudo)

Are you running it from the same directory where test.png is? — Devstr
Could you please add the exact command that you use for running the script? — Devstr
To be honest, i'm not quite sure. I'm running this short program in terminal, and I have a picture named 'test.png' on my desktop, so would that be in the same directory? — Tobias Woods
To run this program, I open terminal, then type "Python", then I type in my code — Tobias Woods
Copy your Python script (say it's called myscript.py) to your Desktop. Then do cd ~/Desktop in the Terminal. Then run the script like this : python myscript.py — Devstr

Devstr Devstr · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-19T23:24:28

You need to install the tesseract itself.

As it says in documentation https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki#homebrew

    brew install tesseract

Also I'd recommend installing python through brew as well. That way you won't pollute system python installation.

And it's best to use virtualenv too.

Can't install Tesseract-OCR on Mac

1 Answers