🚀 Tesseract PHP Extension

A high-performance C++ PHP wrapper for the libtesseract OCR library. Developed by Operative IT, this extension is an improved, feature-rich, and PHP 8.x compatible fork of the original work by phplang/tesseract.

---

✨ Features

• 🏎️ High Performance: Native C++ implementation for maximum speed.
• 🐘 PHP 8 Ready: Fully compatible with the latest PHP versions.
• 🔧 Granular Control: Fine-tune OCR Engine Modes (OEM) and Page Segmentation Modes (PSM).
• 🎯 Region Processing: Extract text from specific coordinates within an image.
• 📦 Multi-Platform: Agnostic build system for macOS, Debian/Ubuntu, and BSD.

---

💻 API Overview

namespace Operativeit;

class Tesseract {
    public function __construct(?string $lang = "eng", int $oem = self::OEM_DEFAULT);
    public function setImage(string $filename): self;
    public function setPageSegMode(int $mode): self;
    public function setRectangle(int $left, int $top, int $width, int $height): self;
    public function getUTF8Text(): string;
}

---

🚀 Quick Start

1. Basic Extraction

use Operativeit\Tesseract;

$tess = new Tesseract();
echo $tess->setImage("sample.png")->getUTF8Text();

2. Multi-Language & Region Extraction

use Operativeit\Tesseract;

$tess = new Tesseract('spa', Tesseract::OEM_LSTM_ONLY);
echo $tess->setImage("invoice.jpg")
          ->setRectangle(100, 100, 500, 50) // x, y, width, height
          ->getUTF8Text();

---

📦 Installation & Build

🐧 Debian / Ubuntu

1. Install Dependencies

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config git php-dev libtesseract-dev libleptonica-dev tesseract-ocr-eng

2. Build & Install

cd tesseract-1.0.0
phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

3. Enable Extension

# Replace [8.x] with your exact version (e.g. 8.4)
echo "extension=tesseract.so" | sudo tee /etc/php/[8.x]/mods-available/tesseract.ini
sudo phpenmod tesseract

---

🏗️ Create Debian Package (.deb)

For professional deployment, you can generate a standard package:

# Install packaging tools
sudo apt install build-essential debhelper devscripts dh-php php-all-dev pkg-config

# Build the package
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b

# Install the resulting .deb
sudo dpkg -i ../php-tesseract_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb

---

🍎 macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel)

Tested on macOS Sequoia/Tahoe with Homebrew.

# Requirements
brew install tesseract leptonica php

# Compilation
phpize
./configure
make
codesign -s - --force modules/tesseract.so
cp modules/tesseract.so /opt/homebrew/lib/php/pecl/$(php-config --extension-dir | xargs basename)/

Enable on macOS

# Add to your PHP configuration
echo "extension=tesseract.so" > /opt/homebrew/etc/php/[8.x]/conf.d/tesseract.ini

---

📚 Reference Tables

Page Segmentation Modes (PSM)

Constant	Description
PSM_OSD_ONLY	Orientation and script detection only
PSM_AUTO	Fully automatic page segmentation (Default)
PSM_SINGLE_COLUMN	Assume a single column of text
PSM_SINGLE_BLOCK	Assume a single uniform block of text
PSM_SINGLE_LINE	Treat the image as a single text line
PSM_SINGLE_WORD	Treat the image as a single word
PSM_SINGLE_CHAR	Treat the image as a single character

OCR Engine Modes (OEM)

Constant	Description
OEM_TESSERACT_ONLY	Legacy engine only
OEM_LSTM_ONLY	Neural nets LSTM engine only
OEM_TESSERACT_LSTM_COMBINED	Legacy + LSTM engines
OEM_DEFAULT	Based on what is available (Default)

---

✅ Verification

Confirm the extension is loaded correctly:

php -m | grep tesseract
# or
php --re tesseract

---

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Developed with ❤️ by Operative IT.