Take the 2-minute tour ×

I am interested in using OCR to recognize text from a document that doesn't contain words. Rather, it is a document with a long string of "random" printed characters. I have been trying to use tesseract to scan the text, but it seems to be looking for words. Is there a way to tell tesseract to just do plain character recognition?

share|improve this question
I have updated the question to fix the complaint. –  Daniel Aug 28 '13 at 15:33
The old Presto! PageManager that came with the scanner, did not do spellchecking by default (windows), it has spell checker but post OCR. I wonder if you can dissapear the dictionary on any software doing auto correction, it could not do it then. The OCR is not by default looking at whole words, except mabey for alignment. –  Psycogeek Aug 28 '13 at 17:04
@Daniel - Now its a question that can actually be answered. –  Ramhound Aug 28 '13 at 17:08

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Yes, you can disable the dictionaries by defining a configuration file containing:

load_system_dawg F
load_freq_dawg F

and specify it with the command.

share|improve this answer
This does appear to do what I wanted. Sadly, the results aren't much better for the text that I was working with, but it does answer the question. Thanks! –  Daniel Oct 8 '13 at 17:46

Your Answer


