Unlock the Power of Image-to-Text Conversion with Tesseract.js

Imagine being able to extract text from any image with ease. That’s exactly what Tesseract.js, an open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine, allows you to do. With support for over 100 languages, this powerful tool opens up a world of possibilities for developers.

What Can You Do with Tesseract.js?

Building the App

To get started, we’ll create a new React app using the Create React App command-line tool:

npx create-react-app tesseract-app

Next, we’ll install Tesseract.js and set up our project structure. The app will consist of a simple UI with a “choose image” button, an image display area, and a text output section.

The Magic of Tesseract.js

The real magic happens when we write the convertImageToText function, which uses Tesseract.js to extract text from the uploaded image:

import Tesseract from 'tesseract.js';

const convertImageToText = async (imageUrl) => {
  try {
    const { data: { text } } = await Tesseract.recognize(imageUrl, 'eng', {
      logger: (m) => console.log(m),
    });
    return text;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
};

We’ll load the Tesseract core scripts, initialize the engine, and pass in the image URL to extract the text. The resulting text will be displayed in the UI, giving users a seamless image-to-text conversion experience.

Enhancing the User Experience

To make our app more user-friendly, we can add a progress bar to indicate the conversion progress:

import React, { useState } from 'eact';

const App = () => {
  const [progress, setProgress] = useState(0);

  const handleConvert = async () => {
    //...
    Tesseract.recognize(imageUrl, 'eng', {
      logger: (m) => {
        setProgress(m.progress);
      },
    });
    //...
  };

  return (

  );
};

This simple addition can greatly improve the overall user experience.

The Possibilities Are Endless

With Tesseract.js, the possibilities are endless. Imagine building apps that:

• detect links from images
• solve math equations
• create custom mouse cursors

The potential applications are vast, and we’re excited to see what you’ll build with this powerful tool.