Tesseract - change language file location

Question

I am making an AIR project, which will need some OCR capabilities, so i decided to use tesseract (now i try to get it working on Windows).

My problem is, that can not change the location of the language file - it always tries to look in my Tesseract installation directory (program files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tessdata\mylang.traineddata)

Is there a way that i can configure Tesseract to look for this file where i specify? for example in the same folder as tesseract.exe. I dont want (or perhaps event cant) install an application with the AIR installer. I've tried it with the 3.0 version and the latest SVN version.

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you can, by setting the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable, e.g.:

export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/local/share/

Note that the directory path must end in a /.

Answer 2

i suggest you don't handle tessdata path by TESSDATA_PREFIX. you can define tessdata path in init tesseract. If you use tesseract.exe in command line use following syntax:

tesseract.exe  --tessdata-dir  tessdataPath  image.png  output  -l  eng

if you use tesseract::TessBaseApi, in api.init() init as following:

api->Init(tessdataPath, language) //api->Init("C:", "eng")