/etcryanfb.xyz

Update (2015-09-08):

A pull request I submitted to Homebrew to add a --with-training-tools option to the tesseract formula has now been accepted, so you should be able to just do brew install --with-training-tools tesseract. Please submit any issues with the training tools under OS X to the Tesseract project on GitHub.

In my previous post I outlined getting Tesseract working for OCR of PDF’s on OS X. In this post, I’d like to document how to install and use the Tesseract training tools.

My first efforts at crudely getting the training tools built and installed were just adding the necessary make commands to the Homebrew formula and reinstalling --devel. However, this resulted in some bizarre problems in even getting the text2image command to run: ¹

$ text2image --list_available_fonts 
Error resolving name for ScrollView host --list_available_fonts:8461 
Segmentation fault: 11

$ text2image localhost --list_available_fonts
Starting sh -c "trap 'kill %1' 0 1 2 ; java -Xms1024m -Xmx2048m -Djava.library.path=. -cp ./ScrollView.jar:./piccolo2d-core-3.0.jar:./piccolo2d-extras-3.0.jar com.google.scrollview.ScrollView & wait"
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
Error: Could not find or load main class com.google.scrollview.ScrollView
sh: line 0: kill: %1: no such job
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
ScrollView: Waiting for server...
^C

I decided to try building against --HEAD but got some link errors during the training build. After some more thorough hacking of the formula, I got something that built, linked, and apparently worked. You can see the formula here.

After running brew uninstall tesseract first to remove any existing install, you can build and install my version of the formula with:

brew install --training-tools --all-languages --HEAD https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ryanfb/homebrew/tesseract_training/Library/Formula/tesseract.rb

You should now be able to do e.g.:

text2image --list_available_fonts

Note that fontconfig font locations and caching are a whole other nightmare, and I seem unable to get text2image to respect/use the --fonts_dir argument on OS X. Your best bet seems to be to install things as system/user fonts (e.g. copy into ~/Library/Fonts) and optionally run fc-cache -frv to force a cache update.

Footnotes