[Python] Using Tesseract OCR with Docling PyTessBasseAPI call fails, won't init

I am using docling and trying to get images with scanned text to parse with Tesseract OCR (could be any OCR, but tesseract is preferred if possible).

My code is:

pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions()
pipeline_options.do_ocr = True
pipeline_options.do_table_structure = True
pipeline_options.table_structure_options.do_cell_matching = True
pipeline_options.ocr_options = TesseractOcrOptions()

doc_converter = DocumentConverter(
format_options={
InputFormat.PDF: PdfFormatOption(pipeline_options=pipeline_options)
}
)


The error happens in PyTessBaseAPI._init_api when called with this block in the tesseractocrmodel.__init__ function:

self.reader = tesserocr.PyTessBaseAPI(
lang=lang,
psm=main_psm,
**tesserocr_kwargs,
)


I have all of the language files that are in lang (fra, deu, eng, odu) in both the tessdata dir and copied them into the same place as my py file. What else do I need to do? Python 3.12, tesseract 5.3.4.

Continue reading...