What is tesseract-data?

[ButterflyMelissa]

Hey gang,
I did a dry run for the update and got a list of tesseract-data to choose from. Is that…an AI thing?
If not, then what is it?
Thanks
Melissa

[linux-aarhus]

@discobot

2026-07-23

Plasma Users - updating spectacle will pull tesseract

If you are using Plasma - spectacle has new dependency on tesseract for OCR recognition.

The long choice list is languages supported by tesseract - so look more closely you will find e.g. 25 - tesseract-data-deu for German.

The part you will be looking for is the last three (3) characters of the package name.

This is a new OCR feature of Spectacle

@ButterflyMelissa

an AI thing?

It is local OCR - no AI involved - in fact tesseract is a very, very old application

[scotty65]

[Testing Update] 2026-07-17 - Plasma, KDE Framework, COSMIC, Pipewire, Firefox

Plasma’s screenshot application, spectacle, has recently implemented OCR (to extract text from screenshot images), so tesseract is a required dependency. You should install the tesseract-data package that matches your language (for example, for English, install tesseract-data-eng). The tesseract & tesseract-data-eng packages don’t take up much storage space: ❯ pamac info tesseract | grep Size Installed Size : 4.8 MB ❯ pamac info tesseract-data-eng | grep Size Installed Size : 2…

@ButterflyMelissa

Is that…an AI thing?

No. tesseract is open-source software and has been around for decades:

Tesseract (software)

Tesseract is an optical character recognition engine for various operating systems.[5] It is free software, released under the Apache License.[1][6][7] Originally developed by Hewlett-Packard as proprietary software in the 1980s, it was released as open source in 2005 and development was sponsored by Google in 2006.[8]

In 2006, Tesseract was considered one of the most accurate open-source OCR engines available.[7][9]

Regarding the update wanting to install tesseract-data:

[Testing Update] 2026-07-17 - Plasma, KDE Framework, COSMIC, Pipewire, Firefox

Plasma’s screenshot application, spectacle, has recently implemented OCR (to extract text from screenshot images), so tesseract is a required dependency. You should install the tesseract-data package that matches your language (for example, for English, install tesseract-data-eng). The tesseract & tesseract-data-eng packages don’t take up much storage space: ❯ pamac info tesseract | grep Size Installed Size : 4.8 MB ❯ pamac info tesseract-data-eng | grep Size Installed Size : 2…