PyTesser simple usage error

Question

I've downloaded PyTesser and extracted it.

I was in the pytesser_v0.0.1 folder and tried to run the sample usage code in the python interpreter:

from pytesser import *
print image_file_to_string('fnord.tif')

and the output:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "pytesser.py", line 44, in image_file_to_string
    call_tesseract(filename, scratch_text_name_root)
  File "pytesser.py", line 21, in call_tesseract
    proc = subprocess.Popen(args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1259, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

NOTE: I'm in Ubuntu 12.10 with Python 2.7.3

can anyone help me understand this error, and what can I do to fix it ?

Answer 1

This isn't as well documented as it could be, but if you are not on Windows you need to install the tesseract binary for your platform. On Ubuntu and other Debian based Linux distributions, apt-get install tesseract-ocr. Then you can run:

python pytesser.py

which uses the test files phototest.tif, fnord.tif and fonts_test.png to test the library.