Tesseract: tessdata location

[Shreeshrii]

I git cloned the tesseract-ocr repositories on ubuntu 14.04 with the following structure

tesseract-ocr
tesseract-ocr/tesseract
tesseract-ocr/tessdata
tesseract-ocr/langdata

The build process (autogen, make, sudo make install, sudo ldconfig) put the tessdata files with configs and tessconfigs subdirectories and pdf.ttf in /usr/local/share/tessdata

This puts tessdata related files in two locations:
tesseract-ocr/tessdata
and
/usr/local/share/tessdata
(in addition to the source in tesseract-ocr/tesseract/tessdata)

As a regular user I cannot copy the tesddata files to /usr/local/share/tessdata

$ cp ./tessdata/san.traineddata /usr/local/share/tessdata
cp: cannot create regular file ‘/usr/local/share/tessdata/san.traineddata’: Permission denied

---

$ export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/home/shree/tesseract-ocr
$ echo $TESSDATA_PREFIX
/home/shree/tesseract-ocr

If I use the above tessdata prefix, then tesseract does not find the config files ..

$ tesseract testing/phototest.jpg testing/phototest-jpg -l eng -psm 3
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine v3.05.00dev with Leptonica
$ tesseract testing/phototest.jpg testing/phototest-jpg -l eng -psm 3 pdf
read_params_file: Can't open pdf
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine v3.05.00dev with Leptonica
$ tesseract testing/phototest.jpg testing/phototest-jpg -l eng -psm 3 tsv
read_params_file: Can't open tsv

---

$ export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/local/share/tessdata
$ echo $TESSDATA_PREFIX
/usr/local/share/tessdata

If I use the above then tesseract does not find the traineddata files even when tessdata-dir is pointing to the correct location

$ tesseract --tessdata-dir=../ testing/phototest.jpg testing/phototest-jpg -l eng -psm 3
Error opening data file /usr/local/share/tessdata/eng.traineddata
Please make sure the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable is set to the parent directory of your "tessdata" directory.
Failed loading language 'eng'
Tesseract couldn't load any languages!
Could not initialize tesseract.

$ tesseract --tessdata-dir=/home/shree/tesseract-ocr testing/phototest.jpg testing/phototest-jpg -l eng -psm 3
Error opening data file /usr/local/share/tessdata/eng.traineddata
Please make sure the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable is set to the parent directory of your "tessdata" directory.
Failed loading language 'eng'
Tesseract couldn't load any languages!
Could not initialize tesseract.

---

I can get around it by copying configs, tessconfigs and pdf.ttf to
/home/shree/tesseract-ocr/tessdata directory.

But this should not be required. What am I missing in the process?

[zdenop]

Git repository is for developers who know how to deal with their system.
Regular users should use packaging tools of their system.

[amitdo]

Before you run those commands, you should put the *.traineddata files in tessdata
subdirectory in the source tree.

The *.traineddata files must be places in the tessdata directory together with the config files.

[Shreeshrii]

Thanks, @amitdo

Need at a minimum to copy
osd.traineddata
eng.*

[amitdo]

As a regular user I cannot copy the tesddata files to /usr/local/share/tessdata

$ cp ./tessdata/san.traineddata /usr/local/share/tessdata
cp: cannot create regular file ‘/usr/local/share/tessdata/san.traineddata’: Permission denied

Well, /usr is a system directory so you can't write to it without admin rights.

To run a command as a root user use sudo.

Be careful when running commands with sudo, you might damage your system if you type the wrong command!

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/karmic/man8/sudo.8.html
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/terminal/