Easiest way to run Tesseract from a Mac

[Nick White]

Hi all,

I was looking at the Tesseract wiki, and it states that "The easiest
way to install Tesseract is with MacPorts." I don't think that is
true any more. MacPorts requires XCode to be manually installed
before it can be installed, which doesn't look like it's very simple
for a non-expert.

Homebrew seems much simpler, plus it is very popular, doesn't
require sudo, and is frequently updated, so I think we should be
recommending that first in the Mac OS X section of the wiki. Any
objections? I don't use a Mac myself, so possibly I am
misunderstanding something.

My proposed new text is this:

## Mac OS X

The easiest way to install Tesseract is with
[Homebrew](http://brew.sh/). Once it is installed, you can install
Tesseract, including all language data, by running the command:
```
brew install --all-languages tesseract
```

If you only need English recognition you can instead install using
this command:
```
brew install tesseract
```

Sound good?

Nick

[Allistair]

I had issues installed with Homebrew - it didn't install the dependencies very well like Leptonica etc. but could just have been an issue I was having. Conversely MacPorts worked out of the box.

Nick

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[Nick White]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 03:46:32PM +0100, Allistair wrote:
> I had issues installed with Homebrew - it didn't install the dependencies very
> well like Leptonica etc. but could just have been an issue I was having.
> Conversely MacPorts worked out of the box.

Interesting. Do you remember what exactly went wrong with the
dependency installation? It would probably would be easy to fix.

Nick

[Allistair]

It was a while ago, but I know it was painful enough to install an Ubuntu VM to compile Tesseract instead before discovering MacPorts ;)

Nick

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[Helmut Wollmersdorfer]

Am Donnerstag, 20. August 2015 14:44:49 UTC+2 schrieb Nick White:

Hi all,

I was looking at the Tesseract wiki, and it states that "The easiest
way to install Tesseract is with MacPorts." I don't think that is
true any more. MacPorts requires XCode to be manually installed
before it can be installed, which doesn't look like it's very simple
for a non-expert.

Homebrew seems much simpler, plus it is very popular, doesn't
require sudo, and is frequently updated, so I think we should be
recommending that first in the Mac OS X section of the wiki. Any
objections? I don't use a Mac myself, so possibly I am
misunderstanding something.

I develop on Mac und have production on Debian/Linux.

Had no luck with MacPort at all.

I changed to homebrew, and followed this excellent HOWTO:

https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2014/11/13/command_line_ocr_on_mac_os_x.html

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

[Allistair]

This, I think, just illustrates there is no one-size-fits-all approach. All methods should be enumerated for installing Tesseract for Mac.

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[Nick White]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 02:13:17PM +0100, Allistair wrote:
> This, I think, just illustrates there is no one-size-fits-all approach. All
> methods should be enumerated for installing Tesseract for Mac.

I disagree. Mac OS X is a homogenous enough system that we ought to
be able to do it right, once, for everyone. Ryan Baumann (who posted
the howto Helmut pointed to) just updated the homebrew 'recipe' for
Tesseract, and noted that the homebrew defaults for leptonica have
changed such that 'brew install tesseract' should do the right thing
now for all people.

If it doesn't work for someone, they should give us details of why
not, and we can fix it. This is free software, we can do better than
"providing 2 options that work some of the time" - we can just fix
bugs ourselves.

Nick

[Allistair]

OK but you forget some users will prefer to use MacPorts. Instead of forcing Homebrew onto them, I see no harm in offering alternates to accommodate different tastes.

Nick

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[Hugi Thordarson]

Hi all,

From experience, I think Homebrew should be suggested as the primary means of installation. When I first attempted to use tesseract, I spent hours fighting macports and then trying to compile tesseract myself. I was about to give up when I finally happened upon homebrew which worked perfectly the first time.

Installation is the user’s first impression of the software so it’s rather important.

- hugi

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[buyi wen]

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