Tesseract uses the Leptonica library to read images with 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 (including animated WebP) - requires libwebp
- BMP - no library required*
- PNM - no library required*
* Except Leptonica
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.
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.
Tesseract does not support reading animated GIFs files. When given such a file, Tesseract will read only the first image in the sequence of images contained inside the file.
Tesseract does not support the HEIC and the AVIF formats.