gImageReader For Linux

Tesseract OCR (or more commonly known as Google Tesseract OCR since the development was taken over) is one of the most popular and well-established OCR engines out there boasting language recognition for well over 100 languages out of the box.

Even though it's true that things have moved on quite a bit as of late with all the AI technologies making their way into pretty much all aspects of our lives, Tesseract OCR Engine is still the go-to open-source OCR engine for most apps of this sort.

gImageReader is one such solution, a free, open-source, and cross-platform GTK/Qt front-end for Tesseract OCR.

Even though the GUI is not the prettiest out there, it's a very functional one. You get a classic GUI with a top toolbar (that provides access to all the tools), a simple sources section (where all the loaded files are displayed), a basic image viewer, and, of course, the text extraction section.

In terms of functionality, gImageReader offers more than might meet the eye at first. For instance, you can process multiple images and documents in one go, you can rely on the automatic recognition area or manually choose it, apply various post-processing to the recognized text (such as spellchecking), as well as import PDF documents and images from your computer, scanning devices, or directly from the clipboard.

What's more, the app allows you to generate PDF documents from hOCR documents.

Even though it may not look the part, gImageReader is a solid and reliable application if you're looking for fast and somewhat basic extraction of text from images, scanned documents, and screenshots, and you don't want to deal with the command-line by running the classic Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine.