Input formats

Supported input formats

Tesseract uses the Leptonica library to read images in one of these formats:

• PNG - requires libpng, libz
• JPEG - requires libjpeg / libjpeg-turbo
• TIFF - requires libtiff, libz
• JPEG 2000 - requires libopenjp2
• GIF - requires libgif (giflib)
• WebP requires libwebp
• BMP - no library required*
• PNM - no library required*

* Except Leptonica

Unsupported input formats

If a file format is not supported by Tesseract, you should use a third party software to convert it to another format that is supported by Tesseract.

PDF

Tesseract does not support reading PDF files.

If you need to OCR PDF files, you should either convert them to another format or use OCRmyPDF.

Note: Tesseract does support PDF as an output format.

Animated WebP

Tesseract does not support reading animated WebP files.

Animated GIF

Tesseract does not support reading animated GIF files.
If given such a file, Tesseract will only read the first image in the sequence of images contained in the file.

Other formats

Tesseract does not support these image formats:

• HEIC
• AVIF
• JPEG-XL