PDF woes: "pixRead: image file not found error"

[John Muccigrosso]

Recently installed tesseract and am having some trouble with PDFs. The error is some form of:

Error in fopenReadStream: file not found
%���� in pixRead: image file not found: %PDF-1.3
%���� cannot be read!
Error during processing.

where the 1.3 may be 1.4 or 1.6. Things are fine with a jpg or tiff version of the same PDF (created by exporting from Preview.app).

System: Mac OS X 10.9.5.

"tesseract -v" reports:

tesseract 3.04.01
 leptonica-1.72
  libjpeg 8d : libpng 1.6.23 : libtiff 4.0.6 : zlib 1.2.5

I installed tesseract and leptonica with homebrew and "brew info tesseract" reports:

tesseract: stable 3.04.01 (bottled), HEAD
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/
/usr/local/Cellar/tesseract/3.04.01_1 (93 files, 39.5M) *
  Poured from bottle on 2016-05-27 at 15:41:15
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/tesseract.rb
==> Dependencies
Required: leptonica ✔
Recommended: libtiff ✔
==> Options
--with-all-languages
 Install recognition data for all languages
--with-opencl
 Enable OpenCL support
--with-training-tools
 Install OCR training tools
--without-libtiff
 Build without libtiff support
--HEAD
 Install HEAD version

I suspect some missing package or something similar, but don't know what exactly.

TIA.

[Quan Nguyen]

Tesseract cannot read PDF (which is a document format) directly. You'll need to convert it to an image format first.

[John Muccigrosso]

Ugh, of course. Thanks!